No, gagging over interracial marriage is not the ‘conventional view’

By Ezra Klein, Wonkblog

“In his column Tuesday, Richard Cohen explores the more reactionary edge of Iowa’s Republican blogosphere. ‘Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled,’ he writes, ‘about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children.’

Given the context of the column, I think that Cohen is using ‘conventional views’ to mean ‘culturally conservative views.’ But insofar as ‘conventional’ means ‘based on or in accordance with what is generally done or believed,’ acceptance of interracial marriage is overwhelmingly conventional. A July poll from Gallup finds that 87 percent of Americans approve — up from 4 percent in 1959.”

Read the full article.