Every so often Louisiana makes international headlines, and it's always for the wrong reasons. That's partly because even in 2009, more than fifty years after the end of Jim Crow segregation, this state has way more than its fair share of redneck racists.

Two years ago, the world's press beat a path to the little town of Jena, where a handful of nooses hanging from a tree proved that the racial fault lines of the Deep South still lay close to the surface.

More recently, the state's lukewarm electoral support for Barack Obama had undoubted racial roots; Jimmy Carter was right to point out that many people hate him for the colour of his skin. Only 14 percent of whites voted for him in Louisiana. Many of those were in New Orleans, a haven of relative tolerance, and he received a rapturous reception when he visited on Thursday.

This week, a justice of the peace in the town of Hammond took his place in the international spotlight after refusing to grant a mixed-race couple a marriage licence, on the grounds that their union was doomed to failure. Keith Bardwell began his justification with the words "I'm not a racist". Nine times out of ten, this is followed by a "but", and so he continued: "I just don't believe in mixing the races that way. I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom."

As I said in my previous post, this is a wonderful place in which to live. But I still despair of it on a regular basis.