This spring, like every spring, is sponsored by Crate & Barrel, Williams Sonoma and, depending on your friends, Tiffany's. It's wedding season around the country, and Federal Marriage Amendment season on the Hill. Our lawmakers have decided that this issue merits a great deal of their time, and our own, so in this spirit Stare DCisis revisits one of the most important constitutional decisions about marriage that was ever handed down by the Supreme Court. And it involves a marriage consecrated in the District.

In 1958, a Virginia couple decided to get married in Washington, D.C.. Thing is, she was black, and he was white, and Virginia had a law prohibiting interracial marriage. When the couple, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Loving, returned to Caroline County, Virginia, they were indicted by a grand jury and banished - yes, banished - from Virginia for 25 years in place of a jail sentence. They moved back to D.C. and filed suit against the state for violating their constitutional rights. Due to some unsurprisingly long delays in the Virginia state court system, the U.S. Supreme Court would not hear and decide their case for another nine years.

As of that day, in 1967, a whopping 16 states had laws prohibiting or punishing interracial marriage. Even true blue Maryland had such a law, though it wisely repealed it at the outset of the Lovings' litigation. Though the remaining 15 states were, shall we say, the "usual suspects," states like California, Colorado, and even vow-happy Nevada had bans on interracial marriage well into the 1940s, though they were later repealed.

Virginia has outfitted this country with some of its greatest legal thinkers - our most famous Chief Justice, John Marshall, comes to mind - and its finest advocates came up with some slick sophistries to defend the racist law. Virginia was for lawyers, not for lovers, or for the Lovings, at this point in time.

The state had made two principal points: first, that the law was applied "equally" to blacks and to whites, and therefore did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Second, Virginia argued that the statute served a legitimate purpose, to "preserve the racial integrity of its citizens," and to prevent "the corruption of blood," "a mongrel breed of citizens," and "the obliteration of racial pride."

In a fittingly brief opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren disabused Virginia of any notion that these laws were constitutional. They violated the Equal Protection Clause by drawing distinctions based on race. Period. Such laws were "odious to a free people," and a state would be hard pressed to show why they were necessary. In fact, it would be impossible, Warren said: "There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of racial discrimination which justifies this classification."

Moreover, the Virginia law banning interracial marriage violated a second constitutional principle by depriving the Lovings of a fundamental liberty. The freedom to marry, Warren wrote, is "one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men [and women.]" This freedom could not be abridged for such a repulsive purpose.

This last section of the opinion, the "two" in the "one-two" punch, is where most of the legal action is these days in the gay marriage debate. The Supreme Court recently held that laws banning sodomy were deprivations of liberty, not offenses against equality. Justice Scalia, in his dissent, made special mention of Loving as an example of the kind of equality reasoning that would not apply to gay rights. (For a set of articles attacking, defending and questioning this decision, click here.)

A federal marriage amendment makes this (pyro)technical debate moot. The amendment would stand on equal footing with the Fourteenth Amendment and serve to limit its application. It remains up to the American public, then, to decide, on the basis of their own ideals of liberty, equality, religion, and ethics, where to draw the line. Meanwhile, on June 12th, people will celebrate "Loving Day" in honor of a decision from the time when the Court seemed happy to erase one of the last (official) lines preventing a truly integrated society.

Photo of bride and groom by DHBPhotography on Flickr.