Politics: Onward from New Hampshire

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Warren's decision, as Not Me reads it (the decision makes more sense without the language in bold):

• This case presents a constitutional question never addressed by this Court: whether a criminal statutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. For reasons which seem to us to reflect the central meaning of those constitutional commands, we conclude that these criminal statutes cannot stand consistently with the Fourteenth Amendment.
  
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  The Equal Protection Clause requires the consideration of whether the classifications drawn by any criminal statute constitute an arbitrary and invidious discrimination. The clear and central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to eliminate all official state sources of invidious racial discrimination in the criminal laws of the States. Invidious racial discrimination in the civil laws of the States is A-OK with us.
  
  There can be no question but that Virginia's miscegenation statutes, which are criminal laws, rest solely upon distinctions drawn according to race. The criminal statutes proscribe generally accepted conduct if engaged in by members of different races. Over the years, but ony when the question has come up in the context of a criminal law, this Court has consistently repudiated "distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry" as being "odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality." At the very least, the Equal Protection Clause demands that racial classifications, especially -- make that "only" -- suspect in criminal statutes, be subjected to the "most rigid scrutiny," Korematsu v. United States (1944), and, if they are ever to be upheld, they must be shown to be necessary to the accomplishment of some permissible state objective relating to criminal punishment and nothing else, independent of the racial discrimination which it was the object of the Fourteenth Amendment to eliminate. Indeed, two members of this Court have already stated that they "cannot conceive of a valid legislative purpose . . . which makes the color of a person's skin the test of whether his conduct is a criminal offense."
  
  There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this criminal classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy. It's just fine with us if Virginia wants to say that only people of the same race can get married to each other, so long as they don't enact criminal penalties. After all, the point of the Civil War was only to protect slaves from excessive criminal punishment. We have consistently denied the constitutionality of criminal measures which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race. 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.