Word: courtly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...white male citizen of Virginia, married a black fellow Virginian out-of-state and was charged, along with his wife, with violation of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The couple challenged the constitutionality of this law under the Fourteenth Amendment, and on appeal, the Supreme Court of Virginia upheld it because the state has a personal stake in preserving the “racial integrity” of its citizens. In addition, since a man and a woman who violate this law are both punished equally, the law surely grants “equal protection?...
...unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court obliterated their reasoning. Violation of the Equal Protection Clause, wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren, is related to “arbitrary and invidious discrimination,” regardless of the fairness with which punishments are distributed. Since marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man” that is “essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness,” to deny this “fundamental freedom” to two people who love each other on such an arbitrary criteria as race...
...supporters of Prop 8 will argue that Loving’s guarantee of a “freedom to marry” is completely irrelevant to the question of gay marriage because, quite simply, gay marriage is not actually marriage. As a New York Appellate Court put it in Hernandez v. Robles (2006), “until a few decades ago, it was an accepted truth for almost everyone who ever lived…that there could be marriages only between participants of different sex,” whereas interracial marriage has always been between a man and a woman...
...crucial flaw in this argument, and the reason why Prop 8 is such a threat to Loving, is that the Virginia courts didn’t believe that interracial marriage was “marriage” either. Marriage is a divine institution, wrote the Virginian judge that originally gave the Lovings their sentence, and God “placed [separate races] on separate continents,” in order to demonstrate that He did “not intend for [them] to mix.” In Naim v. Naim (1955), the Virginia Supreme Court similarly argued...
Unless the court can find a viable reason to distinguish between interracial marriage and gay marriage, they must therefore conclude that Prop 8 is an unconstitutional as the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. If they fail, they will be tossing into the dustbin the reasoning that the Supreme Court used in Loving to strike down laws that banned interracial marriage, thereby implicitly overriding it. Two years ago, we elected a president raised by parents whose marriage was only considered fully valid after a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. Perhaps one day, after the Court makes the right decision regarding...