Happy Valentine's Day

I was trying to think of something to write today but Valentine's Day isn't one of my best topics. Than I saw something a friend posted on Flickr and there is no way in hell I can top this so I'm going to borrow it. I hope she doesn't mind.

"In 1958, Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, who lived in Virginia, were married in the District of Columbia to avoid Virginia’s ‘Racial Integrity’ law which outlawed marriage between different races. After returning home, Virginia police broke into their house and found them sleeping in bed together, for which they were arrested. In 1959 they were sentenced to one year in prison. The judge in the trial invoked religious arguments, stating that since God had created the races on different continents, He clearly did not mean for them to marry. The Lovings chose a 25 year suspended sentence on the condition they moved out of their home state of Virginia. In 1963 The ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Lovings, which wound its way to the Supreme Court of the United States, which unanimously ruled the Virginia law unconstitutional (Loving v Virginia, 1967).

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 … is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law.”
In 1945, after the US had helped win the right of freedom from oppression for people around the world, people of different races could not marry in 30 of 48 states (www.lovingday.org/legal-map).
Luckily, progress happens

My point on this Valentine’s Day? Governor Christie of New Jersey (and others), positive change is happening - don’t be on the wrong side of history."

Happy Valentine's Day