“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”

…He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said….

“There is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage,” Bardwell said. “I think those children suffer and I won’t help put them through it.”

[From the story about a Louisiana judge who refused to marry an interracial couple. This is not really a funny wedding thing, though I am strangely amused by two things.

First, the judge’s insistence that he allowed black people to use his bathroom, which brings up so many questions. Does he allow other people of other races to use his bathroom? Why would you even think about mentioning this? If I particularly disliked someone, I don’t think my first defense would be “And I even let them use my bathroom!”

Obviously, despite my eye-rolling, his reaction was clearly a reference to two laws that were overturned in the mid and late 1960s—the right to have segregated bathrooms in the United States until 1964, with the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, and the ban on interracial marriages in multiple states, which was overturned in 1967, with Loving v. Virgina. I’m just surprised that he didn’t say that he allowed black people to drink his tap water!

Secondly, even though I was born a decade after Loving v. Virgina, I am never surprised by this sort of comment, though I think the judge’s commentary about interracial children could easily be disproved by looking at, you know, the President of the United States.]