I am not naive.  I know that our country has a horrendous past regarding the treatment of those the white establish deem as other.  Our differences use to be rather easy to determine–White was good–everything else was bad.  Pretty simple right.  Well what happens when whites don’t get the memo or choose not to drink the kool-aid?  It throws the establishment off balance and the results are often catastrophic.

Meet the Lovings:

All they did was love each other in 1958 Virginia.  They showed their love by getting married.  Less than 2 months after their marriage they were arrested and sentenced to 1-year in jail.  Their sentence was suspended if they would leave Virginia–for good.

They came to visit family for Easter and were again arrested.  This was 1958.  Both of my parents were alive.  There were 24 states that had miscegenation laws at that time.  They just wanted to love each other, raise their 3 children and be around family.

This documentary hurt me deeply.  It reminded me that while my children (who are black) don’t have to deal with this level of racism in their daily life, this level of racism still exists.  The people who spoke out in favor of miscegenation are still alive.  Their children to whom they pass on their beliefs are still alive.  Our world still favors white and rich and the other has many more obstacles.

I know that these laws existed and I know that they were horrible.  But I never thought about the real-life implications of the laws.  But this documentary really brings to life the implications of these laws and the real people whose beliefs fueled these laws.  That is what really get me.  That people really thought they needed to protect the “purity of the races.”  That is such a crap reason.  I am pretty sure the whites who supported these laws were only worried about the “purity of their own race.”

The thing that struck me and by struck I mean scared the shit out of and pissed me off the most is that in 1967 (while the Loving V. Virginia case was moving through the courts on it’s eventual way to the Supreme Court) a federal judge said “God created separate races on the separate continents to ensure that the races did not mix.”  This was espoused by a federal judge who was charged with upholding the law.  What does God have to do with this?  Isn’t there a separation of church and state?

This movie forced me to think about and consider the implications that these thoughts and feelings have on me and my children.  I am lucky that my kids are raised in an environment where they are accepted for who they are as people and not because their skin is beautifully brown.  Skin color is really no different than hair color or eye color.  It is the only thing we can’t change about us, but it is just a thing.  I cut off all of Noah’s beautiful curls–he is still the same kid.

Richard Loving said it best.  When their ACLU lawyers asked him if there was anything that he wanted them to tell the court, Richard simply replied–“Tell them I love my wife.”

It is time that the state and people’s own beliefs stopped deciding who can love whom and let everyone “love their husband/wife.”

The supreme court in a 9-0 decision, in 1967, stated:

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 discrimination. 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.

I would like to see the phrase sexual orientation added to this.  It’s time we stop separating groups and bring us all together.