By Bill Devol
It wasn’t until 1967 that the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruled on the Constitutionality of black people marrying white people. The case was Loving v. Virginia, and it started through the lower courts in 1963.
It was a felony for people of different races to marry in Virginia. If you have time, and you don’t mind having your blood pressure raised, Google “miscegenation laws.”
Up until the time of Loving v. Virginia, the SCOTUS had avoided taking any cases concerning interracial marriage. Their 1967 ruling struck down miscegenation laws on the books in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Delaware.
The Lovings had been married in 1958 in Washington, D. C., where their union was legal, but they could not live as man and wife across the line in Virginia. They moved to Virginia anyhow and were arrested in their bedroom and charged with violation of Virginia’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act.
The judge that heard their original case in 1958, Leon Bazile, was lenient and said he would suspend the couple’s sentences if they agreed to leave Virginia for 25 years. The Lovings moved to Washington, D. C., and decided to appeal Leon’s original verdict in 1963.
It took until 1965 for Judge Bazile to reconsider his original verdict. He declined to change his mind. At that time Leon wrote:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, 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.”
Leon was speaking for God…case closed.
When Loving v. Virginia was offered to the SCOTUS, they realized they had to make a ruling. All 9 Justices ruled in favor of the Lovings. It was unanimous. The following was contained in the SCOTUS ruling:
“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 to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”
You see where this is going, don’t you?
According to Leon Bazile and millions of other white people in 1965, God was on their side. They were positive that God did not want the races to intermarry (have sex), but the SCOTUS said, “We don’t care…fair is fair.”
More than 40 years ago, the SCOTUS had to step in and tell the Godstapo to mind their own freaking business. They had to wait for someone to keep pushing a case up the legal chain of command before they could rule, but they did the right thing when they finally took Loving v. Virginia.
What’s the deal?
Today’s Godstapo says God doesn’t want gay people to get married (have sex). They can lather up into homophobic tizzies just thinking about Adam and Steve or Sally and Eve, however, all the laws preventing gay people from getting married amount to the same thing as the Virginia law overturned by Loving v. Virginia.
Someday, and sooner than the Godstapo believes, there will be a case that the SCOTUS will finally accept that will end all this anti-gay insanity once and for all. The ruling could go something like this:
“Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of human beings,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival…. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the sexual orientation 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 is clear when it says ‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.’ A person is not defined by their sexual orientation, so to deny members of the same sex any of the rights and privileges granted to other citizens would be to deny their personhood. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of a particular sexual orientation resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”
Suck it Scalia!
