Loving v. Virginia

Audience

The Supreme Court could be said to have had three audiences for its ruling against laws that prevented couples defined as interracial from getting married. First was the Lovings themselves, who sought an end to their liability for prosecution for their marriage as well as an end to the enforcement of the terms of their plea bargain preventing their publicly living together back in Virginia. At the same time, the Court’s audience consisted of public authorities in all sixteen states in which antimiscegenation laws had persisted as late as the time of the ruling. In light of Loving, those officials no longer had the authority to enforce such laws, whether in denying marriage licenses to interracial couples, prosecuting married couples under a criminal statute against interracial marriage, or denying inheritance benefits on the basis that a marriage, because interracial, had always been invalid in that state.

The third audience was all of America, and indeed the world, with the opinion announcing that new rules of race and marriage were now in place—whereby African Americans might in every state be suitable marriage partners for Caucasians—as the last wall in the edifice of American apartheid had been taken down. Looking further ahead, the ruling’s sweeping language about “the freedom to marry” resonates up to the present time, as in state after state, same-sex couples seek to have the language and logic of Loving v. Virginia about “equal protection” and “the freedom to marry” applied to them.