Let's turn to last month's Pew report on interracial marriage in America, which breaks down actual intermarriage rates by state.
So we should look for other polls that compare attitudes towards interracial marriage in Alabama and Mississippi, or in the South more generally, to those elsewhere in America.Let's start with this Gallup/USA Today poll last August.Unsurprisingly, the South shows the least approval of black-white intermarriage of any region of the country.
This may sound low, but it is higher than the intermarriage rate for American Jews at a comparable moment in their history, and above that of modern Mormons.
Cardinal Ruini recently spoke out against intermarriage between Christians and Muslims.
Some 100,000 Bushmen live in southern Africa, perhaps half of them in Bostwana; numbers are hard to confirm, since ethnic lines are blurred by intermarriage.
Intermarriage was the family pastime and a first cousin made the ideal spouse was, indeed, often the only option under this rigid ruler.
The biblical story of Ruth, a gentile who took on her Israelite in-laws' religion, is a favourite parable.Rising intermarriage is also a fact of Jewish life in Australia, Canada, France and Britain, hosts of four of the world's other main Jewish populations.
But already there are encouraging signs: Muslims appear to be far better integrated in America than in Europe, as measured by their share of non-Muslim friends and by the intermarriage rate.
Intermarriage is also eating away at the minority share of the population.
But the reality after centuries of cohabitation, intermarriage and economic integration is that "drawing boundaries has become impossible", as Hasim Hasimi, a Kurdish politician, puts it.Take Istanbul; home to some 2m Kurds, and easily the world's biggest Kurdish city.
Yet there has also been a long history of intermarriage and adoption of non-natives.
