(June 27, 2015 at 9:36 pm)SteelCurtain Wrote:(June 27, 2015 at 9:29 pm)Lek Wrote: How do you know the majority of the population thought that way? Anyway, look up the definition of marriage in a 30 year old Webster's dictionary.
Oral interviews in the LOC archives, for one. I did a thesis for a college class on this very topic. It was a very common attitude. I should add that the attitude was more prevalent in the south, for obvious reasons. I should have been more specific, the majority of the populations in the states where the laws existed.
And we are talking about the state's definition of marriage, not the dictionary definition. The state's definition of marriage is what the courts and legislatures have power over, and what we're actually talking about. The red herring about what Webster's says is idiocy and you know it. What the law is---that's what matters. And the laws in those states defined marriage such that it was punishable by prison time to intermarry races.
I'll accept what you present as fact. In that case, they did redefine marriage and were wrong to do so.