Loving V Virginia Essay

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Loving v Virginia: Then and Now
“Under our constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of the other race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the states.” In 1967, Earl Warren led the Supreme Court when it was faced with choosing to support a state’s rights of having their own laws or equal protection of the laws granted to all citizens under the Constitution. The case of Loving v. Virginia was sent to the Supreme Court because Virginia, including 15 other states, enforced an anti-miscegenation statute, which disallowed marriage between white and black people. The court case was important then and continues to affect change in the twenty-first century.
In 1958, Mildred Jeter, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, travelled …show more content…

The U.S. has recognized marriage as a basic human right by many court cases including Loving v Virginia. Since protecting the marriage of a black-Cherokee woman and a white man, the case has also helped support the legalization of same-sex marriage in all 50 states. This is important because it creates a more united America by knocking down social constraints that disallowed the 5-10% of America identified as homosexual from being married. In the same way as blacks were not allowed to vote, gay couples were not allowed to marry. The legalization of same-sex marriage is helping bridge the split in social order of America by not outlawing same-sex couples for being “immoral” and implying the couples are less-deserving of marriage than a heterosexual relationship. The change of expanding the 14th amendment’s meaning of equal protection of rights for all citizens, in this case for marriage, is helping people treat each other as equivalent and allowing the country to take another step towards liberty and justice for

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