Tell the Court I Love My Wife

In 1967, as ACLU attorney Bernard Cohen prepared to argue before the United States Supreme Court, he asked his client Richard Loving if there was anything he wanted conveyed to the justices. Richard, a white bricklayer from Caroline County, Virginia, had married Mildred Jeter — a woman of Black and Rappahannock Native American descent — in Washington, D.C., on June 2, 1958. For that marriage, a Virginia judge had banished them from their home state for twenty-five years. Now, nine years later, Richard offered no legal theory, no constitutional argument. He said simply: "Tell the court I love my wife."

On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Loving v. Virginia that laws forbidding interracial marriage violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that marriage is "one of the basic civil rights of man" and cannot be restricted on the basis of race.

Richard Loving understood something theologians have written volumes to express. Love is not an abstraction to be debated — it is a person standing beside you. The apostle John wrote, "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love" (1 John 4:7-8).

When the church reduces love to theory while tolerating barriers between God's children, it has lost the plot. Love, as John defines it, does not sort by category. Wherever believers draw lines that God has not drawn, they move further from the heart of the One who is love itself.