Happy Loving Day

This one is important in our family. We remind our children about it each year. Wife's parents had to travel to another state to get married because this hadn't been decided yet.

Loving v. Virginia - Wikipedia

On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in favor of the Lovings that overturned their criminal convictions and struck down Virginia's anti-miscegenation law. The Court's opinion was written by chief justice Earl Warren, and all the justices joined it.

The Court first addressed whether Virginia's Racial Integrity Act violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, which reads: "nor shall any State ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Virginia officials had argued that the Act did not violate the Equal Protection Clause because it "equally burdened" both whites and non-whites, since the punishment for violating the statute was the same regardless of the offender's race; for example, a white person who married a black person was subject to the same penalties as a black person who married a white person.

The Court had accepted this "equal burden" argument 84 years earlier in its 1883 decision Pace v. Alabama. But in Loving, the Court rejected the argument.[36]

[W]e reject the notion that the mere "equal application" of a statute containing racial classifications is enough to remove the classifications from the Fourteenth Amendment's proscription of all invidious racial discriminations ....

...

The State [of Virginia] finds support for its "equal application" theory in the decision of the Court in Pace v. Alabama. ... However, as recently as the 1964 Term, in rejecting the reasoning of that case, we stated "Pace represents a limited view of the Equal Protection Clause which has not withstood analysis in the subsequent decisions of this Court."

— Loving, 388 U.S. at 8, 10 (citations omitted).[37]​