"And Love For All…"

Love begets love, love knows no rules; this is the same for all. – Virgil

The reason for all the hearts today is that it’s a holiday. – Yes, Hallmark didn’t announce it, so you may not have known, but it is LOVING DAY – the day of a landmark anti-miscegenation case in which an ugly law was struck down in Virginia in 1967.

‘Virginia is for Lovers’ is what it says on all the tatty t-shirts and mugs. Well, maybe, but it wasn’t for Loving, for quite awhile. Ms. Mildred Jeter (an African American lady) and Mr. Richard Perry Loving (a Caucasian gentleman) were residents of Virginia who married in June of 1958 in Washington DC, leaving Virginia to evade a state law banning marriages between any white person and a non-white person. When they returned home, they were charged with violation of the ban, pleaded guilty, and were sentenced to one year in prison, with the sentence suspended for 25 years on condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia. They left… but they decided not to leave it at that. (If you want to play with an interactive map of American history, that lets you see dynamically when States became free to marry, check this out!) The über cool Chief Justice Warren‘s statement on the day that the Lovings won the legal right to marry has just the right tone:

“Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

And, that, boys and girls, is why today a few savvy people (you now among them!) celebrate the right to love anyone they choose.

There are some who labor under the misapprehension that Loving v. Virginia was the last anti-miscegenation case struck down. Not so, dear people. Though the U.S. Supreme Court ruling made it illegal to hold that law, the last anti-miscegenation law (and incidentally, that word is SO made up – as are all words are, yes, but we savvy American English speakers like to create new ones when the words we have don’t sound positive enough, pseudo-scientific enough, or negative enough. Think about it: carpet bombing. Soft plush fibers vs. many people anonymously dead. Whoever coined that one is probably rich.) was struck from the books in ALABAMA in the year 2000. (Yes, you heard me.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Alabama joined the 20th.

A lovely state, I’m sure, and no offense to anyone there. You’ll all just excuse me if I don’t ever visit.)

Some interracial couples and families are leery of the idea of another “fake holiday” (Heh, heh, Kwanzaa, anyone?), but the fact is, everything is made up and nothing springs organically intact from the Earth. Why not have a day to celebrate the right to love anyone, without the luridly hypersexed drama of the martyred Saint? On the day that the right to love anyone becomes REALLY true, in the GLBTQ community as well, there will be that much more to celebrate.

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