Loving v. Virginia Racial Discrimination

Loving v. Virginia - Racial Discrimination

Racial Discrimination: Loving v. Virginia

The issue presented in Loving v. Virginia (1967) was rather national basis was the proper standard of review to use in order to evaluate constitutionality. There were statutes in Virginia that may not have been constitutional under the Equal Protection Clause. Additionally, the Equal Protection Clause should not/does not allow a restriction on the freedom to marry solely based on the race of the individuals who plan to get married. There was laws enacted in Virginia that made it a felony for black and white people to intermarry, and when that took place many took issue with the constitutionality of that law

. The Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia upheld the law, because it stated that "racial integrity" was important and should be preserved for the citizens of the state. It was also argued that both black and white were being punished and/or discriminated against, so there was no actual racial discrimination taking place. With that in mind, it was stated that the statute was well within the rights of Virginia law

The Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution of the United States was called into question and analyzed. In that Clause, the issue is that everyone deserves equal protection under the law, and that it is not proper or acceptable to discriminate based on any characteristic that a person cannot change

. In other words, issues such as race or gender are not open to discrimination because they are not characteristics that a person can change or elect to avoid or adjust. While Virginia was convinced that discriminating based on race as long as it was more than one race was acceptable, there were others who did not believe that this was the case

. In order to better understand the reasoning here, it is necessary to see both sides of the argument.

Those who believed that the statute was legal and proper based their argument on the idea that the statute was affecting more than one race, so it was not discriminating against people in a racial way

. In order to be truly discriminatory, the statute would have to select one race and deny that race something, while not denying it to any and all other races. Preserving the alleged racial integrity of the area was very important to individuals who were concerned about racial mixture and interaction. With that in mind, the statute was made in an effort to ensure that racial mixing did not take place

. Whether this was actually "racist" or the people behind the law truly believed that what they were doing was right was not the issue at hand, and there was more to consider than just what a group of lawmakers wanted and needed to "protect" their state and society. The will of the people also matters, and when the will of the people is strong the laws may have to be changed and adjusted to reflect the people and the times in which they live.

Those who were against the law from the start generally felt that way because they were concerned about racial discrimination in the state

. Blacks and whites intermingled all the time, and to say that someone could not marry someone else because of that person's race was becoming an antiquated idea that many people wanted abolished and changed. The argument on this side was that each and every person was an individual, and race should not be a deciding factor for a law

. Even when a person is of a different race, that does not make that person any more or less human than a person of any other race. The fact that the law was restricted to blacks and whites also mattered, because the law did not affect any other races or the legality of intermarriage between them

. That, alone, made the law racially motivated, which was not legal under the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The Court ultimately ruled that the statute was unconstitutional, and it was struck down

. The reason behind this was the idea that the statute did not extend to all races equally, and that it was inappropriate to make laws by which race was a deciding factor in what a person could and could not do

. Race is a serious issue when it comes to law. It is also an issue that is not controllable, because a person's race is an inherent characteristic with which that person is born. By creating a law that states that blacks and whites could not intermarry, and by not restricting any other intermarriage between other racial groups, the State of Virginia was using racial motivation to make law, and that is illegal under the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution