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Current mood:  cheerful
"Loving Day" is the annual celebration of the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Loving v. Virginia, which overturned the miscegenation laws that remained in 16 states and prohibited interracial marriage. Today marks the 40th anniversary of this decision. Evan Wolfson explains the background well: When the question of race discrimination in marriage came before the U.S. Supreme Court (the Court had actually gotten it wrong in previous decades and ducked the question repeatedly in the years following Perez), it was in a 1967 case brought by a black woman, Mildred Jeter, and a white man, Richard Loving. The couple had had to leave their home state, Virginia, in order to get married where their love was allowed. The law in Virginia, like that of many other states, provided: "All marriages between a white person and a colored person shall be absolutely void without any decree of divorce or other legal process." An interracial marriage was considered a non-starter, contrary to the very "definition" of marriage.
Back from their honeymoon, the Lovings were arrested one night in their own bedroom—with their wedding certificate hanging over their bed—and prosecuted for the "crime" of "evading" their state's discriminatory law and violating Virginia's same-race restriction on marriage. Mildred and Richard were convicted of marrying the "wrong" kind of person, their marriage was pronounced an un-marriage, and they were given a choice of a year in prison or twenty-five years exile from their home state. They chose exile, got a lawyer, and sued to defend their family. The Lovings lost in state courts all the way up; the trial judge went so far as to declare: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and he placed them on separate continents[.] The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix." The Virginia Supreme Court upheld the discriminatory "definition" of marriage, and the case came before the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed, declaring, "The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men."
[...] As late as 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court finally got Loving right, the polls showed 70% opposed. Imagine the injury to our nation if the opposition had prevailed with arguments like "let the people vote" or attacks on "activist judges," and had cemented discrimination into our Constitution. Would we ever have secured the equality and freedom that most of us consider to be our nation's commitment and defining greatness?Happy Loving Day to all! Loving Day info from "Freedom to Marry" website
2:11 PM
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