There’s an interesting twist of history going on here. In the lead-up to the Obergefell decision, same-sex-marriage supporters often invoked the language of the civil-rights era, comparing their fight for marriage equality to the fight to end legally protected racial discrimination. But in turn, some conservative, religious Americans—and particularly those in the South—are also calling back to that era in U.S. history to defend their beliefs. Derision toward the South is still common and hateful—take, for example, Michael Lind’s recent musing in Politico Magazine, “Some deluded Southerners still pine for secession from the Union. Yet no doubt there are also more than a few liberal Northerners who would be happy to see them go.” But the easy invocation of Southern backwardness is no longer so neat as it used to be.

Of course, there has never been a single “southern point of view.” In 1960, a white Atlantan named Eliza Paschall made that argument in The Atlantic, declaring she had no patience for those who were slow to reject segregation. In a piece on her state’s reactions to Brown v. Board, “A Southern Point of View,” she wrote, defiantly:

It is common practice among Southern spokesmen to refer to the “Southern point of view.” Our capitol in Atlanta resounds with speeches which say that all Georgians agree. And it is always stated or implied that what they all agree on is that our present system of a legally racially segregated society is best. I am a Southerner. From my point of view … our schools are separate but not equal, and even if they were, legal racial segregation has no place in a democracy.

She argued that certain Southerners had become complacent in their thinking on racism, particularly those liberals who claimed to oppose segregation but nonetheless called for gradual social change driven by the citizenry, rather than federal government. And indeed, when the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell last month, there were echoes of this in arguments against the decision. Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, for example, said in a statement, “The people of Alabama also voted to define marriage as between a man and woman. I always respect the people’s vote, and I am disappointed that the Supreme Court has disregarded the choice made by the people of Alabama in its decision today.” As Justice Antonin Scalia, a non-Southerner, put it in his dissent to the ruling: “To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: No social transformation without representation.”

But perhaps the most remarkable dissent belonged to Clarence Thomas, the black Georgia-native who came of age in the time of massive Southern resistance to social change. This is a man who benefitted directly from the overthrow of the Jim Crow South, who likely would not have been able to marry his white wife if not for the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia, which ruled anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. But the right to gay marriage, Thomas wrote, is nothing like the right to interracial marriage; in his view, this comparison is “offensive and inaccurate.” Anti-miscegenation laws were created to support and perpetuate the institution of slavery, he argued, and after the Civil War, they became a standard tool of white supremacists. “Laws defining marriage as between one man and one woman do not share this sordid history,” he continued. “The traditional definition of marriage has prevailed in every society that has recognized marriage throughout history.”