Loving v. Virginia

Impact

The ruling’s impact was immediate for the Lovings, who found themselves free to live openly together with their children in Virginia. There the children would grow to adulthood, and their parents would live out the rest of their lives. Richard Loving, among whose many occupations was that of bricklayer, symbolically heralded the family’s newfound freedom by building a permanent new home of brick for them all.

Elsewhere, throughout the nation, public authorities could no longer enforce miscegenation laws. Interracial couples in Delaware, Arkansas, Louisiana, and many other states thus suddenly found that the key obstacle to their marrying had been taken down. Loving’s impact also extended to different dimensions of the law of marriage. The outcome of litigation in Oklahoma, for example, took a new turn after Loving v. Virginia, since a 1939 marriage between a white man and an African American woman, under which the widow’s daughter and granddaughter had sought to inherit property in the 1960s, was suddenly valid; thus it could not be successfully contested by a son from his father’s earlier marriage who did not wish to share his father’s estate. Some years later, in 1984, the Supreme Court had occasion to revisit the Loving case and expand its reach after a local court in Florida removed a white child from the custody of her divorced mother, Linda Sidoti, on the grounds that she had married a black man, Clarence Palmore, Jr. The Court decided that race could not be grounds for reassigning child custody when a parent remarries across racial lines.

Within four years of Loving v. Virginia, same-sex couples were going to court seeking to obtain marriage licenses, arguing on the basis of the language and logic of Loving that they should not be denied the right to marry. In state after state, beginning with Minnesota in 1971 in Baker v. Nelson, such arguments were rebuffed. State legislatures thus yet retained the authority to define marriage and to continue, on grounds other than race, to restrict people’s freedom to marry. In the 1990s, however, state judges began to prove receptive to such arguments if couched in terms of the provisions of state constitutions rather than those of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Hawaii and Alaska, voters subsequently approved a change in the language of their respective state constitutions to undo rulings based upon judicial interpretation of the former language. But in Vermont, “civil unions” resulted from a state supreme court ruling in favor of same-sex litigants, Baker v. State of Vermont. And in Massachusetts even that degree of change was deemed too small, an unconstitutional infringement of a constitutional right to marry. In Goodrich v. Department of Public Health (2003), the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, relying in part on Loving v. Virginia, interpreted the Massachusetts state constitution to require that same-sex couples enjoy the full right to marry that heterosexual couples do.