This past Friday, Mildred Loving passed away at the age of 68 at her home in Virginia. Most of you may not know who Mildred Loving, and yet in 1967 she was involved in one of the most significant Supreme Court decisions ever made. It is this decision to which the current SCOTUS should look when it makes any sort of ruling on marriage issues, and yet the Court fails to do so. It is for this reason that we need to get justices on the Supreme Court who actually care about civil rights, and use the Constitution in the way it was meant to be used…as a means to provide rights to us all.
In Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), SCOTUS found that Virginia’s “Racial Integrity Act of 1924,” which contained its anti-miscegenation law, was unconstitutional. For those of you who didn’t have to have words like “anti-miscegenation” become part of your vocabulary in school, basically the law said that it was illegal to have an interracial marriage. The court, in its wisdom, overturned its 1883 decision in Pace v. Alabama, 106 U.S. 583 (1883), which upheld such laws. To most of us, at least those of us that are open minded and not racist, the facts of the case are pretty astounding.
The plaintiffs in the case were Mildred and Richard Loving, who had been married in 1958 in Washington, D.C., and were arrested and plead guilty to miscegenation. Section 20-59 of the Act stated that “If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years.” (See Loving, 388 U.S. 1, 4). There were also provisions which automatically voided “all marriages between ‘a white person and a colored person’ without any judicial proceeding.” (388 U.S. at 4-5).
In a letter she wrote last June, on the 40th anniversary of the ruling, Mrs. Loving described what she and her husband had to endure:
Not long after our wedding, we were awakened in the middle of the night in our own bedroom by deputy sheriffs and actually arrested for the “crime” of marrying the wrong kind of person. Our marriage certificate was hanging on the wall above the bed. The state prosecuted Richard and me, and after we were found guilty, the judge declared: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” He sentenced us to a year in prison, but offered to suspend the sentence if we left our home in Virginiafor 25 years exile.*
Eventually, the Lovings filed suit stating that such anti-miscegenation laws violated the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause. Interestingly enough, the Presbyterian and Catholic Churches each took strong stances in favor of allowing inter-racial marriages so as to help sway public opinion on the matters. On June 12, 1967, in a unanimous decision, the Warren Court held that anti-miscegenation laws violated both the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, stating that:
To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State. (388 U.S. at 12).
For Mildred Loving, it was not even a political question, it was one of a right to be in love and marry that person. She saw this right as something that extended to everyone, no matter the circumstances. She said:
I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights. *
Although it will never happen with the extreme Right Wing makeup of the current Supreme Court, hopefully future Courts (and this will obviously be many decades in the future, since we have our current extreme right wing Court for at least the next 30 years) will listen o her thoughts, and the Warren Court’s rationale to gay marriage. Because what is truly the difference between a classification based on race and a classification based upon sexual orientation…not much! Prior to this ruling, the logic of the courts was that banning interracial marriage did not infringe upon one’s rights because a white man and a black woman could still get married…just not to each other. It is the same logic they use now for gay marriage…a lesbian can get married, just not to a woman; She CAN marry a man! How this obvious parallel cannot be evident to every court who rules on it, including our own Supreme Court in the State of Washington, is beyond me. They always sidestep the issue…and maybe with the coming California ruling a state will finally do the right thing.
In short, although a reluctant hero, we should all remember the legacy of Mildred Loving and hope that our future generations will continue to move us forward in terms of civil rights and equality. Currently we are rolling back 150 years worth of civil rights with the decisions that the Roberts Court is making, and let’s hope that one day the damage can be undone.
