It was a familiar scene at the U.S. Supreme Court: states argued that allowing certain couples to marry would impose long-term harms upon children, families and social institutions. They contended that it is not the judiciary’s place to scrutinize restrictions upon the freedom to marry. And they fell back upon the claim that the definition of marriage is a longstanding tradition.
No, I’m not talking about last week’s argument on same-sex marriage; I’m referring to the 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, which ultimately struck down bans on interracial marriage as unconstitutional. Switch a few names and adjectives and you could have approximated swathes of the oral argument from 48 years ago, listening to Virginia defend a central vestige of segregation. Indeed, Virginia now acknowledges that it had supported interracial marriage bans and school segregation with “the same arguments offered by marriage equality opponents today” and powerfully concedes that it was on the “wrong side” of those issues.
Read the full op-ed here.
