A short Rant...

Loving v. Virginia

Richard and Mildred Loving were married in 1958 in Washington D.C. because their home state of Virginia still upheld the antimiscegenation law which stated that interracial marriages were illegal. They were married, then lived together in Caroline County, Virginia. In 1959 they were prosecuted and convicted of violating the states's antimiscegenation law. In 1967, 16 states including Virginia, still had antimiscegenation laws on the books and were enforcing them. Richard and Mildred Loving were each sentenced one year in jail, but promised the sentence would be suspended if they agreed to leave the state and not return for 25 years. Forced to move, they returned to Washington D.C. where, in 1963, they initiated a suit challenging the constitutionality of the antimiscegenation law. In March of 1966, the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the law, but in June of 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled the law unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court overturned the convictions in a unanimous decision, dismissing the Commonwealth of Virginia's argument that a law forbidding both white and black persons from marrying persons of another race, and providing identical penalties to white and black violators, could not be construed as racially discriminatory. In its decision, the court wrote:

Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.... 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.

Now what I think:

If marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," as the court says then it is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to discriminate gay people from marrying. If you can not say (as in the Loving's case) a white man can not marry a black woman, then how can you turn around and say that a white man can't marry a black man? A person can not choose their race and ethnicity anymore than they can choose their sexual orientation or gender! If the laws forbidding people of the same gender to marry is constitutional then the Loving v. Virginia case should be overturned.