Loving v. Virginia (1967)
Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 12:49PM Read the opinion here.
Issue. Is a criminal statute prohibiting inter-racial marriage constitutionally permissible under the Equal Protection Clause?
Background. The Lovings, an inter-racial couple, were married in the District of Columbia and they returned to their home state of Virginia, where they were tried and convicted for violating the State's ban on miscegenation. The trial judge suspended the one year sentence provided that the Lovings leave Virginia and not return to the state for 25 years. Instead, the Lovings sough to invalidate the law. The case made it to the Supreme Court which decided that Virginia's law violated the Equal Protection Clause.
Court's Analysis. Virginia argued that its anti-miscegenation law did not violated the Equal Protection Clause because it applied equally to blacks and whites - neither could marry members of the other race. The Court, however, rejected such a narrow interpretation of the Equal Protect Clause. "Equal application" is not appropriate when the purpose of the law is to discriminate on the basis of race.
The 14th Amendment was ratified to end race-based discrimination and Virginia's anti-miscegentaiton law rests on nothing more than a distinction drawn according to race. In fact, the law was entitled "An Act to Preserve Racial Integrity" and was only meant to preserve the white race since whites could not marry outside of their race while blacks could as long as it was not with whites.
The only justificiation for the law was to maintain White Supremacy ant that is not a permissible state objective for equal protection purposes. Therefore, the law fails constitutional scrutiny.
The Court also found that the law violated the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment since it deprived them of the liberty to marry without the due process of the law. The Court writes (and which is interesting in the context of same sex marriage):
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.
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.