Sunday, June 12, 2011

Happy Loving Day

Loving Day is an unofficial holiday and annual celebration held on June 12, which is the anniversary of the 1967 United States Supreme Court decision Loving vs. Virginia which struck down anti-miscegenation laws.  Anti-miscegenation laws criminalized interracial marriage and sometimes also sex between members of two different "races."

The plaintiffs in Loving vs. Virginia were a black woman, Mildred Delores Jeter Loving, and her husband, Richard Perry Loving, a white man.  The defendant was the state of Virginia because of its Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized marriages between white and non-white persons.  It's kind a funny to write about this considering that we have in Barack Obama, a "biracial" child of a white woman and a black (African) man.

So today, let's remember that love doesn't always care about quantities of melanin.

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