If the original US Constitution (the 1787 text) would have explicitly allowed US states to have anti-miscegenation laws (and please assume that all of the subsequent Amendments to the US Constitution have the exact same text in this TL that they had in real life), would Loving v. Virginia, or whatever its equivalent case would be in this TL due to the butterfly effect, be decided differently? On the one hand, the original text here would be quite explicit about this, and the legislative and ratification history of the 14th Amendment would at best be ambiguous towards this topic due to the lack of consensus on it:
On the flip side, though, there would also be extremely massive pressure to reach the right result in this case, not only for domestic reasons but also possibly for international reasons if the US would have still wanted to aggressively appeal to the non-white populations of the developing world, which is kind of hard to do if huge parts of the country still criminalize sex and marriage between two people of different races.
Anyway, what do you think? @Ricardolindo @stevep @Zyobot @sillygoose @History Learner @Skallagrim @Earl @Atarlost
On the flip side, though, there would also be extremely massive pressure to reach the right result in this case, not only for domestic reasons but also possibly for international reasons if the US would have still wanted to aggressively appeal to the non-white populations of the developing world, which is kind of hard to do if huge parts of the country still criminalize sex and marriage between two people of different races.
Anyway, what do you think? @Ricardolindo @stevep @Zyobot @sillygoose @History Learner @Skallagrim @Earl @Atarlost