What a great idea: a day set aside in D.C. to commemorate the anniversary of the day the case of Loving vs Virginia was decided. The decision ended three hundred years of marriage defined in many parts of America as a racially separatist institution. Inter-racial couples still face lingering social stigma and it's worth reminding ourselves how vile it is to discriminate against someone because of a couple's decision to commit to one other exclusively for life. Money quote from Hannah Arendt, writing in Dissent in the winter of 1959, eight years before Loving:
The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which "the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardles of one's skin or color or race," are minor indeed. Even political rioghts, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionable belongs.
Clear enough. And yet today, it still isn't to some.