Interesting photo. Of course, it has nothing to do with homosexual marriage, but liberals are inclined to throw the race card into any losing argument in hope of shutting down discussion.
It's getting to the point where they throw the card before any argument even begins, because they know they got nothing, and they want to thwart the argument from the start.
Is this the work of Mathew Brady? Is it photoshopped? Is this image from Soweto, South Africa? Can it be authenticated?
Let me see... No, no, no, and yes.
It is the work of George N, Barnard, Civil War photographer who traveled with Sherman in his march through the South. It is most definitely not Photoshopped, although you can find many examples, including some of stunning colorations of this black&white photograph, and
one in particular where you can better see the partial leg and coat of another soldier sitting down on the floor inside the doorway. It is not Soweto, South Africa, it is at #8 Whitehall Street (the big 8 inside the round white circle on either side of the storefront) in Atlanta on the block between Hunter Street and Alabama Street. That stretch of Whitehall is now Peachtree Street, and Hunter Street is now MLK Drive. As you can see in the advertisement below from the
Southern Confederacy Newspaper, May 26, 1863, the proprietors were Crawford, Frazer & Co., "General Commission Merchants, Auctioneers and Dealers in Negroes." (there are also scans to be found of advertisements of all of the neighboring business, many referencing each other for location purposes, as well as the previous tenants of most of the locations, that are kept and published by the Library of Congress and Civil War historians and fanatics).
Like so many pictures of the Civil War, the ["Auction & Negro Sales," Whitehall Street] photograph was taken as a
stereograph. The
Library of Congress has the two original glass plates for this image, and while you cannot download the glass plates, you can download hires tiff images of the left, right and combined plates. This picture in a 90mb tiff file, like so many from that period, is rather stunning in it's detail and resolution. If you are interesting in things like this, the Library of Congress web site is all that and a bag o' chips, as you browse by collection, catalog number, and do searches for things you might be interested in. The depth and breadth of what all is in there is astonishing.
Liberals wet their pants at the opportunity to inject race into discussions having nothing whatsoever to do with race. One can imagine black Americans detest being compared to homosexuals.
Yeah, you don't hear many blacks using the interracial marriage or slavery argument as applied to same-sex marriage. Interestingly enough, the younger and more educated you are, the more likely you are to see the false equivalency of same-sex marriage and interracial marriage. That's because young minds tend to be more liberal in the first place, and they've had the false equivalency mounded into their impressionable heads for 20 years, usually in the form of "Interracial marriage used to be against the law, and now it's not, because attitudes change and it was wrong to outlaw interracial marriage, therefore, same-sex marriage." The topic of
why, or even
how the two subject are different, or the same, is never even brought up.
