What did the Supreme Court decide in Loving v. Virginia?

0:04The court actually decided not to intervene in an early case involving a challenge to a state ban on interracial marriages and held off until it did decide the case out of Virginia Loving v. Virginia in 1967. Virginia, like a number of other states at the time, had a law prohibiting interracial marriage. Richard and Mildred Loving were an interracial couple in Virginia, fell in love, wished to marry, knew that they could not marry in their home State of Virginia, and so left the state and went to Washington DC where they could as an interracial couple marry at the time. They subsequently returned to Virginia where all of their friends and family resided and were arrested for the crime of their marriage and sentenced for the fact of their marriage to a year in prison. But the sentencing judge explained that he would defer their service of their sentences if they would leave the state and not return for 25 years.

0:58They initially leave the state, returned to Washington DC, raised their children in their early years there, and subsequently bring a constitutional challenge to the law under which they had been convicted and essentially banished, and ultimately prevail in a unanimous opinion, holding that the Constitution does not permit states to prohibit marriage on the basis of race, to prohibit interracial marriage. The opinion in loving rests in equal parts on two distinct provisions of the 14th Amendment. The equal protection clause and the law in Virginia prohibiting interracial marriage, very clearly, draws impermissible distinctions on the basis of race, and the court finds the law impermissible on that basis. But also interferes with a liberty protected by the due process clause,

1:43which is the liberty to choose whom to marry, and the right to marry the Court had articulated in other cases is, well, never as clearly as in loving, but had alluded to elsewhere, but the right to form a family and to marry is a fundamental liberty guaranteed by the due process clause. The court finds that on the basis both of equality guarantees in the 14th Amendment and on the basis of that amendments liberty guarantees.

2:08The Virginia law cannot stand. The Court strikes it down and says in some pretty striking language, the state justifies or seeks to justify this prohibition on terms that can only be understood as a desire to advance white supremacy. The court uses that phrase and says, the Constitution does not allow this. Loving an incredibly important opinion in its own right and lays the foundation to much later Supreme Court cases, finding a right to marry including a right to marry someone of the same sex.