Last week the Arkansas Senate voted in favor of another Jim Crow law by a 20-7-7 margin. If you are as old as I am and you lived in the Deep South, you remember some of the Jim Crow laws. They made it illegal for black people to eat in the same restaurants as white people, or to drink from the same water fountains, to stay in the same motels, or to use the same restroom facilities. Black people were not allowed to attend the same public schools or vote or hold public office. White and black people were not allowed to marry, and if caught in public in something that might appear to be a romantic relationship, it was likely that they would be threatened or beaten or occasionally killed. We dealt with interracial couples legally through felony charges of adultery and fornication. Couples of one race could not foster or adopt children of another race.

The people who passed these laws meant well. They believed they were protecting families and children. They were nearly all good Christian men. These laws tended to thrive in the Bible Belt. For the most part they had the backing of their churches. Most white churches had no black members and many had policies against blacks attending. Some churches allowed blacks but reserved the balcony section for them to sit separated from the whites. A few white pastors who found their consciences troubled by these traditions would have liked to speak out, but it was generally too risky for them. So the most generous pastors just kept silent about these political matters and stuck to spiritual things.

Other pastors enjoyed great popularity by preaching energetically from the pulpit against secular liberal innovations like integration. They told the story of Phinehas, the warrior of God, who stabbed an interracial couple with a spear as they engaged in a coital act, thus stopping the plague. God rewarded Phinehas with "a covenant of perpetual priesthood, because he was zealous for his God." (Numbers 25) Through history Bible-quoters have sincerely defended genocide, slavery, racism, sexism and now gay bashing. Generally they do so without quoting Jesus however.

Prejudice and fear is part of our cultural inheritance from childhood. I don't know when boys and girls begin to notice each other these days, but in my hometown boys started showing interest in girls in fifth grade. That's when you had your first girlfriend, and you traded chains with each other, wearing a silver chain around your neck with the other's name on it. When I let it slip that I wasn't opposed to integration, my girl friend faced me down with fury and said, "But don't you know, that when a white person and a nigger get married their children are almost always niggers?" "So?" I said. She tore my chain from her neck and threw it to the ground, ending our brief relationship.

During my youth, our state was pressured from the outside to confront our prejudices and fears. I wonder if we ever would have been able to do so without interference from what we called "outside agitators." These were liberals from places like Massachusetts, who just didn't understand. They said blacks and whites were equal and should be treated that way legally. They forced their opinions down our throats with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Southerners fought back. We resisted full school integration until 1969 in Mississippi. In 1965 a Virginia court sentenced an interracial couple to jail for getting married in Washington, D.C. The judge's opinion was a strong one: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend the races to mix." The liberal activist Supreme Court overturned that decision in 1967, ruling in Loving v. Virginia that marriage is a basic civil right. Alabama kept their anti-miscegenation law on the books until the year 2000 when it was finally overturned in a state referendum. Nevertheless, forty percent voted in favor of keeping intact their law forbidding interracial marriage.

For most of us in the New South, our racial bigotry is an embarrassing piece of our recent history. But history tends to repeat itself. Last week the Arkansas Senate, energized by Bible Belt Christians, especially from the James Dobson related Family Council of Arkansas, passed a law prohibiting families with gay members from fostering or adopting children. Thousands of Arkansas' children need placement in loving families. Families with gay people are much like families with straight people; families with black people are much the same as families with white people. We all seek meaningful lives and relationships.

Just like in the 1960's, all of the objective voices that study these things have told us that all people are created equal. Every professional group that is dedicated to the health and welfare of children recognizes more than a quarter of century of research showing that gay people are just as capable of being good parents and that children raised by gay parents are just as well adjusted as other children. The Child Welfare League of America, the American Academy of Pediatricians, the American Psychological Association, the National Association of Social Workers all oppose restrictions on parenting by gay citizens. These are a lot like the groups that opposed segregation too.

God finds a way. God overcame most of our public expressions of prejudice and fear of black people. You don't hear sermons praising segregation anymore. Politicians are punished if they use the "N-word." Fifty years from now you won't hear gay bashing from preachers or politicos anymore either.

There are encouraging signs. We have a black Secretary of State and the first serious black contender for President. I have a dream that one day discrimination against gay people will be as embarrassing and illegal as discrimination against black people. Good people want to be good. They'll find a way. In fifty years we'll shake our heads and wonder, how those people in 2006 could have been like that? One day, brothers and sisters. But last week in the Arkansas Senate, our prejudices overcame our care for children. God help us.