R.I.P. Mildred Loving

Mildred and Richard Loving were the brave couple who took their basic human rights to court to challenge Virginia's primeval marriage laws.

The Great State of Virginia (Motto: "Virginia is for lovers") told them to fuck off, so the Lovings -- being good citizens -- took it to the highest court in the land.

Mildred passed away today.

Mildred Loving, matriarch of interracial marriage, dies

By DIONNE WALKER, Associated Press

Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday.

Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.

"I want (people) to remember her as being strong and brave yet humble — and believed in love," Fortune told The Associated Press.

Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.

"There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the equal protection clause," the court ruled in a unanimous decision.

Her husband died in 1975. Shy and soft-spoken, Loving shunned publicity and in a rare interview with The Associated Press last June, insisted she never wanted to be a hero — just a bride.

"It wasn't my doing," Loving said. "It was God's work."
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Why should you care?

Because the Loving Decision took place in 1967. Not 1867.

Because in the memory of those still living today -- in state after state after state, and dug in like ringworms at every level of the federal government -- the cowards, criminals and traitors of the Ku Klux Klan and their racist fellow travelers

ran the world.

Because in the memory of those still living, this was America:
A land your town's untouchable mayor, clean-cut sheriff and respectable businessmen by day,

could also be hooded terrorists who murdered with impunity by night.

And that the lesson that many learned under the brutal tutelage of that era was, if you want to survive, you can sit and reason those who are reasonable. But when dealing with the degenerate and violent grandchildren of the Confederacy,

a firmer hand is often required.

Because when you note the language of Loving v. Virginia, you cannot help but notice that for far too many, the essential message that God has personally conferred a mantle of superiority on Conservative White American Christian Heterosexual Male has remained virtually unchanged.

And the direct, cultural decedents of the preachers and politicians who delivered this bible-wrapped filth are still alive and well and leading the Republican Party under the same banner, but now it has a new coat of paint called "Same Sex Marriage" (shamelessly citing one of my previous posts here):

...I commend to your attention the opening lines of the June 12, 1967, Loving v. Virginia decision, which gets referred to a lot in Left Bloggylvania, but not cited verbatim nearly often enough for my tastes, because here is how it begins (Emphasis added):

"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

The law in Virginia as it read provided...

"Punishment for marriage. -- If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years."

And the penalty for leaving the State to evade the law was...

...If any white person and colored person shall go out of this State, for the purpose of being married, and with the intention of returning, and be married out of it, and afterwards return to and reside in it, cohabiting as man and wife, they shall be punished as provided in § 20-59, and the marriage shall be governed by the same law as if it had been solemnized in this State. The fact of their cohabitation here as man and wife shall be evidence of their marriage."

What more needs be said?

When the cultural Gladys Kravitzes on the Right stomp into the public square dragging Gay Marriage along behind them, this is what’s really on the menu: Their insatiable appetite to impose their witchbag of hate, squeamishness and childish idiocy on everyone else in the Universe for no reason other than they are hateful, squeamish, childish idiots.

And since there is absolutely no quantifiable harm they can point to (In Loving, the “harm” cited was found in the language of Naim v. Naim which “concluded that the State's legitimate purposes were "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”…), time and again -- from slavery, through Jim Crow, through “Loving” and now with Gay Marriage -- you see the same democracy-loathing Red Statists thumping the same Bible, from the same pulpit, to the same squealing mob of culturally malnourished knuckleheads.

Generation after debased generation the disease is passed on, because regardless of where this moral cancer has geographically metastasized over the years, the continuous line of divinely-sanctioned White Male Christian Supremacy that runs from “God, Nooses and Negroes” to “God, Guns and Gays” comes straight out of the spiritual heart of the old Confederacy.
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So why should you care?

Because while it is true that things really have gotten more tolerant and more free since the days of the Loving Decision, the bad news is, a frighteningly large fraction of the American public thinks that's actually a bad thing.