How The Virginia State Statue Of Anti Miscegenation And The Fourteenth Amendment Essay

On July 9, 1868 the 14th amendment to the constitution was ratified. This amendment granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States," which included former slaves recently freed. Although the slaves were freed, there was still discrimination all around them. Discrimination is defined as "differences between things or treating someone as inferior based on their race". In 1800’s through 1900 there was a huge amount of cases that occurred due to violations of the 14th Amendment. Two well known landmark Supreme Court cases involving the 14th Amendment are Plessy vs. Ferguson and Brown vs. Board of Education.

The Equal Protection Clause derives from the Fourteenth Amendment, which specifies “no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws…” As a part of the Reconstruction Amendments, the aforementioned clause was meant to ensure racial equality in the Reconstruction Period and has been applied successfully against the affirmative action. Introduced in United States v. Carolene Products Co., the strict scrutiny has been applied to the cases, in which a fundamental constitutional rights have been infringed or a government action applies to a suspect classification (i.e. race, religion, national background). Specifically, in regards to Bakke v. Regents of University of California, the Supreme Court (“the Court”) concluded that, considering that the University of California, Davis received several Caucasian applicants for its special admission program in 1973 and 1974 and that none of the applicants received the admission to the program since the start, the program unfairly administered in favor of minority races and, therefore, violated the rights of the white applicants under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Furthermore, from Hopwood v. State of Texas, the Fifth Circuit Court ruled under strict scrutiny that, the affirmative action imposed by the University of Texas School of Law (“the law school”) violates the Fourteenth Amendment since neither the law school nor the University of Texas system has proved a proof of

An understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment begins not in Congress, but in the history leading up to the Civil War. The first crucial story in understanding the Fourteenth Amendment is the striking changes in the law of race relations that took place in the North - especially in Bingham’s home state of Ohio - in the dozen or so years before the Civil War began. The second story is about the South, and the legal repression and brutal racial violence that took place there immediately after the Civil War ended (Finkelman, 2003).

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison cowrote "The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom" in 1786 in an effort to end state funded religion. The struffle was fought by religious leaders who requested a state tax to fund their institutions. They feared that without a state tax moral fabric of society would disintegrate. This bill ended the feud between religion and state, and created the precedent for religious freedom in the United States. "Conventional wisdom teaches that secularization was an essential ingredient in the cultural background for liberal democracy. To have liberal pluralistic democracy, it is said, we in the West first had to break away from the religious worldviews that were characteristic of pre-modern feudalism, aristocracy, and monarchy" (Mcconnell, 2003, p.943).

Interracial families are more prevalent today than they have even been and the number of interracial families are growing each year as people are becoming more accepting of people of other races and rejecting the past. However, interracial families still report dealing with issues such as discrimination. Not everyone has yet to accept and welcome the idea of an interracial family in their own family and neighborhoods. Parents and children who are a part of interracial families must deal with multiple biases, how people act towards them, and developing a healthy identity in a world that is not always ready to accept them as they are.

Virginia (1967) decision led to a shift during the era in which the Supreme Court prepared its decision. In doing so, Somerville theorizes that what is crucial about the intertwining of race and sexuality is not the analogical relation but rather the way in which the former depends on the latter for its normative values. It is evident that to some extent the juridical sphere in the Loving v. Virginia (1967) decision employs a universal sphere in the features and right of marriage for all people without restrictions of race, while on the other hand it is at the same time stigmatizing the features of homosexuality as an uncertain, poorly legitimatized foundation for the exclusion of those who are share this same sex love in the state, suggests that miscegenation analogies promote the omission of this heterosexualizing of race as well as the racial construction of homosexual practices that Loving v. Virginia in turn helped move

With the growing racial unrest sweeping the U.S., and particularly the South in the 1960s, The Supreme Court decided that the protections of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution applied equally to blacks and the whites that loved them. The Loving vs. Virginia case ended the abominable assumption that the state has a right to intrude upon the private lives and affections of its citizens, to the point of dictating to them who they were allowed to love.

Our 14th amendment is perhaps the most important amendment because it helps defend some of our fundamental rights. This amendment extends the due process procedure to all citizens when trying to deprive them of life, liberty, or property. The amendment also ensures that everyone born in the United States or naturalized is guaranteed citizenship. This helped grant the right to vote for many americans who before were excluded from this right. It was ratified on july 9th in 1868 following the civil war along with 13th and 15th amendment. These are known as the civil war amendments and had to be accepted by the southern states in order for them to be brought back into the union. The 14th amendment in particular was designed to protect the basic civil rights granted in the constitution to all americans. However a lot of issues have arose over time in regarding the 14th amendment equal protection clause. Movements like Black Lives Matter have brought forth some of these issues happening today. The supreme court has made interpretations of the 14th amendment in cases like Plessy vs Ferguson, Brown vs the Board of Education, and even in when overturning the case Dred Scott vs Sanford. To better understand the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause we have to take a closer look at the interpretations made by the supreme court to

Recently, in the year 2013, there was a case brought to the Supreme Court’s attention that was first trialed in the district court. That case’s name was Fisher vs. University of Texas. It was in this case that the plaintiff, Abigail N. Fisher filed suit against the University of Texas with the claim that the University had violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 13th Amendment. The main question that arose in the question was, “does the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment permit the consideration of race in undergraduate admissions decisions”. The overall decision of the Supreme Court was that the University of Texas hadn’t violated the Equal Protection Clause, and in fact that they were permitted to consider race in the admissions process. I do agree with the Supreme Court’s decision. I agree with said decision because the argument made by the plaintiff Fisher was weak, and the rights of life and liberty weren’t in any way tampered with in the admissions process that the University of Texas was going through in the situation suited.

Before this case, a number of states had anti-miscegenation statues in place, criminalizing love in the name of racism. This case brought an end to the acceptance of scientific racism in the realm of marriage in that showed such legislation not as sound or logical but as hateful and unconstitutional. Loving’s legacy is strong even today, as it played a pivotal role in the groundbreaking same sex marriage case, Obergefell V. Hoges, paving away for the legalization of gay marriage. Without this case and the intervention of the federal government, states could have very well continued their practice of anti-miscegenation policies. The atrocities committed upon the Lovings and the millions of couples affected by such hateful policies are an embarrassment to our nation’s history. This case acted as a federal resolve to past and future Americans fighting for the right to love. Loving V. Virginia led the nation away from its dark past and towards a more equal future, filled not with “scientific” defenses for racism but with scientific defenses against

This amendment confronted the citizenship and legal rights of everyone born in the United States, including former slaves. The Fourteenth Amendment restricted states from enacting laws that restricted the rights of former slaves. This was very important because it ensured that the African Americans had a better chance at receiving the rights that they deserved. With all of the laws that had been preventing the blacks from living as equals in society, the Fourteenth Amendment promised change that was necessary to make strides towards ending the prejudice that had helped lead to the country’s civil

Freedom and civil rights have always been a thorn in America history for a long time ago. Racial unfairness and humanity deprivation was what most colored American people suffered most back in the day. Although the government aimed and worked for equality among every citizen, there is no point to deny that it has failed countless time in the past. However, just because the government failed to acknowledge the rights of colored citizens doesn’t mean that it can stay that way forever and that exactly what the Supreme Court did in the case of Loving V Virginia.

The two articles used were “Understanding the Occurrence of Interracial Marriage in the United States through Differential Assimilation” (Lewis, Ford- Robinson, 2010) and “Marital Dissolution among Interracial Couples” (Zhang, Van Hook, 2009). The first article “Understanding the Occurrence of Interracial Marriage in the United States through Differential Assimilation”, spoke about the unprecedented changes that our society is going though in the 21st century.

The law forbidding interracial marriage was terminated in 1967, and in the midst of rapid racial change, one fact is unmistakable: A growing number of Americans are showing that we all can get along by forming relationships and families that cross all color lines. In the past couple decades, the number of interracial marriages has increased dramatically. Interracial dating and marrying is described as the dating or marrying of two people of different races, and it is becoming much more common to do so. Thirty years ago, only one in every 100 children born in the United States was of mixed race. Today, the number is one in 19. In some states, such as California and Washington, the number is closer to one in 10 (Melting Pot).

My ethnic group is Irish American. I am very grateful to be an Irish American because I know the sacrifice that my grandparents had to make to leave Ireland to come to America was a difficult but beneficial sacrifice. Without both of their brave decisions to come to America, I would not be here today. Both my grandma and grandpa came over to America as young adults but they did not know one another. My grandma has three sisters, but only one of her sisters came to America with her, while the other two sisters chose to stay in Ireland. My grandpa died before I was born thus I do not know much about how he came to America.