PRINTJim Leach Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities
This documentary film, which received major funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, is about a white man and a dark-hued woman of mixed African and Indian descent and their search for acceptance as a married couple under the law. But it is much more. It is the story of America – our values and way of life.
Because the issue was resolved on Constitutional grounds in a seminal Supreme Court ruling it is relevant to note on this the 306th birthday of Benjamin Franklin that on the last day of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Franklin asked a colleague to read a speech he was too weak to deliver. Franklin called on those who didn’t approve of one provision or another of the newly drafted Constitution to doubt a little of their own infallibility. After all, he observed, “when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views.” Despite these human foibles, Franklin expressed astonishment at how “near to perfection” the governance model in the proposed Constitution appeared to him.
Fortunately, the country was ready for a stronger central government to replace the approach to nationhood experimented with under the state-centric Articles of Confederation. The proposed Constitution had its skeptics, and pressure quickly mounted to also stipulate precise, inviolable rights of the people that government could not contravene in an accompanying Bill of Rights.
Some of our founders feared that listing such basic freedoms as religion and assembly and speech in a Bill of Rights might imply the absence or weakening of other rights if they remained unspecified. Hence an Amendment was developed (the Ninth) to make clear that the enumeration of a spectrum of specific rights could not be construed to deny or disparage other individual rights upon which government could also not rightfully infringe.
Richard and Mildred Loving’s Constitutional challenge to Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law was decided on the basis both of un-enumerated rights implicit in the Ninth Amendment and on abridgement of the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In its decision overturning Virginia’s and other similar state statutes, the court wrote:
“Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival…To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. 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.”
The Lovings viewed the issue in deeply personal, less generalized terms. Their attorneys told the Court that all Richard sought was the ability to live with his wife whom he loved. His plea, in effect, was for recognition of a right to love.
I doubt if any court has ever asserted in legal lexicon that obstruction of love is denial of an individual’s inborn right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nonetheless, at the core of the American social compact is the faith-based assumption that rights are not derived from any king or grouping of men, but are endowed to each of us by a Creator. And central to the great faith systems of the world is the precept of love.
It took almost two centuries for two courageous, in-love Americans to remind us of the meaning of our most basic values. NEH is honored to help sponsor this love story that changed the law of the land.