A demonstrator offered her feelings on the state for lovers Sunday in Blacksburg.

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I find it interesting that this comes just days after demonstrators in several Virginia cities, including Blacksburg, protested California’s passage of Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage. Virginia, of course, doesn’t allow same-sex marriage either. So is Virginia for all lovers?

I will go back in the state’s history, before the Virginia is for Lovers campaign even started, to the one of most ironically named Supreme Court cases: Loving v. Virginia. The case, which was argued in front of the Supreme Court 10 days before I came into this world and decided on June 12, 1967, stated that Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute, the “Racial Integrity Act of 1924,” was unconstitutional. This case ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States.

You might be asking yourself, “What is an anti-miscegenation statute?” Such statutes were laws that banned interracial marriage and sometimes interracial sex between whites and members of other races. Virginia was in fine company with such laws, which were also found in Nazi Germany and in South Africa during the era of Apartheid.

Perhaps you’re also wondering if Virginia actually had something against loving? Well, between interracial couples, yes. But the name is actually from the couple who brought forth the suit—Mildred and Richard Loving, who were married in Washington, D.C., in 1958 but were living in Virginia in the 1960s before being charged with “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth” because their marriage was not legally recognized in the state.

Virginia was so much for lovers that it told the Lovings that the state would suspend their jail sentence if they moved out of Virginia. Fortunately, the Lovings filed a lawsuit and won a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court that stated Virginia’s laws against interracial marriage violated both the due process and the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.

And when you think of the Fourteenth Amendment, you must ask yourself, does it not give due process and equal protection to gay Americans, too?

In 2003 the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas considered a challenge to a law that criminalized homosexual sodomy, but not heterosexual sodomy. (Apparently Texas is not for lovers, either—at least not those kind of lovers.) The case raised substantive due process and equal protection issues, just as Loving had done in 1967. Voting 5 to 4, the Supreme Court found that the state lacked a legitimate interest in regulating the private sexual conduct of consenting adults.

And that brings us back to Virginia, which in 2006 passed the Marshall-Newman Amendment to Virginia’s state constitution. That amendment prevents the marriage of same-sex couples and access to the rights that come from marriage­­—and it also adversely affects the rights of unmarried straight couples in the Commonwealth.

“The amendment should be opposed because it is wrong,” said law professor Michael Klarman in a panel discussion about the amendment held in September of 2006. “Not because there is some general principle about not putting lots of things into constitutions but rather because the substance of the amendment is wrong. If somebody proposed an amendment saying white people can’t marry black people or Catholics can’t marry Jews it would be obvious to us that the amendment is wrong. This amendment is equally wrong and if you ask me how I know, I know it for the same reason I know the other things are wrong. It’s wrong to discriminate against people based on race. It’s wrong to discriminate based on religion. It’s wrong to discriminate based on sexual orientation.”

Klarman was a law professor at the University of Virginia at the time but has recently joined the faculty at Harvard Law School.

At Blacksburg's Proposition 8 protest on Sunday, a demonstrator seems to wonder if Virginia's laws are equal for all lovers.

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So the state that is for lovers for many years didn’t like lovers who were of different races. And it doesn’t like lovers of the same sex. But did you know it doesn’t even like men and women who are lovers but who are not married? Here’s the Virginia law about “lewd and lascivious cohabitation”:

“If any persons, not married to each other, lewdly and lasciviously associate and cohabit together, or, whether married or not, be guilty of open and gross lewdness and lasciviousness, each of them shall be guilty of a Class 3 misdemeanor; and upon a repetition of the offense, and conviction thereof, each of them shall be guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor.”

So for all of you who are shackin’ up, you’re breaking the law in this state that for 40 years has said it’s for lovers. Someone remind me, what year is this?

Of course, to be fair, the Virginia is for Lovers campaign arose out of a different context than that of love between two people. “Virginia is for Lovers is one of the most famous slogans in the country but it’s often misunderstood,” said Alisa Bailey, president and CEO of the Virginia Tourism Corporation. “At its core, Virginia is for Lovers represents a love of life and a passion for travel. We invite travelers to come celebrate our 40th anniversary and live out their passions for music, history, wine, culture and adventure in Virginia.”

Just don’t live out some of your other passions with someone from the same sex or if you’re not married.

Perhaps one day in my lifetime Virginia will finally prove that it is for all lovers.
 

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