A Louisiana justice of the peace has ignited a firestorm after refusing to grant a marriage license to an interracial couple.

And, as if he forgot the background of the America’s most high-profile success story – President Obama – Keith Bardwell pointed to his concerns over the future of children who might come from the union of White and Black parents. Obama is the son of a White woman from Kansas and a Black Kenyan father.

"I'm not a racist," Bardwell, justice of the peace of Tangipahoa Parish, told The Hammond (La.) Daily Star. "I do ceremonies for Black couples right here in my house. My main concern is for the children." He also said that most interracial marriages don’t last.

But the NAACP and other civil-rights advocates in the state aren’t so sure that racism wasn’t behind his decision. "He's an elected public official and one of his duties is to marry people. He doesn't have the right to say he doesn't believe in it," Patricia Morris, president of the NAACP branch of Tangipahoa Parish, said Thursday. "If he doesn't do what his position calls for him to do, he should resign from that position."

Morris said that the case was referred to her office, near the Mississippi line, after Bardwell denied the marriage license to Beth Humphrey, 30, and her boyfriend, Terence McKay, 32, both of Hammond. Morris has forwarded the matter to the national office of the civil rights organization.

Humphrey said she was “really shocked, because he's an elected official." It’s clearly a case of racial discrimination, she told CNN. She said that when she contacted Bardwell’s office on Oct. 6 to request the license, she was told by his wife that he does not sign off on interracial marriages. They received their marriage license three days later from another justice of peace in the same parish, which is about 70 percent White and 30 percent Black, CNN reports.

"We would like him to resign," she said. "He doesn't believe he's being racist, but it is racist."