Once, Interracial Marriage Was Banned, Too : Changing responses to the musical ‘Showboat’ may be a harbinger for same-sex marriage.

On the evening of the Hawaii Circuit Court’s opinion that the state has not proved a “compelling interest” to deny gay and lesbian couples marriage, I was witnessing another piece of history. I saw “Showboat” at the Ahmanson Theater, and one of its plot lines deals with the illegal marriage of a mulatto woman to a white man. The characters who try to arrest Julie are the villains of “Showboat,” and Julie’s life is ruined once the bad guys make it so she and her beloved can’t be married. By the time “Showboat” was written, the law was changing, even though public opinion had not. In the late 1920s, when that show appeared on Broadway, much or most of the country still thought that black people and white people should not marry, and their argument was often that it was in the compelling interests of the state to protect the sanctity of marriage, to protect children and to protect an important building block of culture. “Showboat” was avant-garde.

But now, isn’t it interesting that countless people flock to see “Showboat” as a museum piece and take it for granted that the bad guys are the ones who try to stop the marriage between the black woman and white man? And that most of those people see Julie’s life as unnecessarily tragic? And doesn’t that imply that, nowadays, people feel it is in the compelling interests of the state to apply all laws equally?

Unfortunately for America, many people still see interracial marriage as anathema. And that is tragic, both for the couples and for the culture. Interracial couples face extraordinary hurdles. But the law is on their side. Tough as their lives can be, interracial couples have been given a chance to marry as they wish.

Gay people deserve the same application of the law. We must remember that earlier discriminatory laws were supposedly done “in the compelling interest of the state.” And for a lesson on the evils of discriminatory marriage laws, audiences can take a wonderful history lesson from “Showboat:”

“Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly . . .”