The New Yorker Comment: God and Marriage Equality

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/god-and-marriage-equality

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n the late nineteen-fifties, Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter met and fell in love amid the sleepy small towns and picturesque horse farms of Virginia’s Caroline County. Loving was white and Jeter black (as well as Native American), which meant that the state’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 forbade them from marrying each other. So, in 1958, they stole off to Washington, D.C., to tie the knot, and then returned home to live as husband and wife. Soon after the couple moved back to Virginia, however, the local police, acting on an anonymous tip, raided their home and arrested them for violating the ban on what was called miscegenation. The Lovings challenged the basis for the prosecution, but the trial judge, Leon Bazile, explained why the case against them should stand. “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents,” he wrote. “And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” In light of this ruling, the Lovings decided to plead guilty and accept, in lieu of a prison sentence, banishment from Virginia for the next twenty-five years.
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