First, the vast majority of Abrahamic religious denominations in America—Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim—continue to define marriage as the sacred union of one man and one woman, accounting for over 100 million Americans.

Second, though politically potent in the short term, the analogy to interracial marriage is ahistorical and illogical. All of Christendom permitted interracial marriage until eighteenth-century slaveholders devised a political lie to suppress an inconvenient truth: one man and one woman can and do unite to create interracial children, so skin color is irrelevant to marriage.

Some southerners wrapped their racist politics in the rhetoric of religion, but an even larger coalition of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews brought an end to “racial purity” laws using direct appeals to shared religious principles. In fact, the very first case striking down an anti-miscegenation statute was brought by Roman Catholics who made religious liberty arguments against the state of California. Consequently, the “religious liberty equals racism” argument cannot withstand serious scrutiny.