Loving Vs Virginia Case Study

In October 1968, Mildred Loving and Richard Loving both had been sentenced to one year in prison in Virginia, for traveling to District of Columbia to get married as an interracial couple. It was legal there for interracial couples to marry but it was not legal in Virginia at that time. The Lovings were given the choice to either stay and serve out their one-year sentence, or they could leave Virginia and not return together for 25 years. The Lovings chose to move to Washington DC until they became dissatisfied with their quality of life and looked for help to get a repeal of their initial trial results. That is how this case came to the Supreme Court, where it got a unanimous decision that deemed the prohibition of interracial couples as unconstitutional. …show more content…
Virginia also used the 14th Amendment in their case argument it was stated that the law against interracial marriage went against the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment similar, to the argument in Obergefell v. Hodges. Chief Justice Earl Warren stated, "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."
Without the 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, the 2015 case of Obergefell v. Hodges may not have resulted in the lifting of the government restrictions on same-sex marriages. These two cases showed that the Government should not have a say on who people are allowed to love. There needed to be a stepping stone for Obergefell v. Hodges to gain enough traction to win in The United States supreme court. The results showed it is unconstitutional to prevent the legal union between two people in love regardless of race or gender.
Both of these cases exist because people had to fight for who they love; these two cases have greatly increased the quality of lives of numerous individuals. Through history we can always see progress, but although these were two giant steps for The United States Government to take. In 2016, we continue to see people trying to oppose both of these cases’ results, showing that no matter what, it is impossible to appease

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