I heard something about a Supreme Court ruling about interracial marriage that can be related to the current uproar about gay marriage. The case involved an interracial couple a long time ago. Apparently the case went all the way up to the Supreme Court in which the judge ruled that a person could not be deprived of “life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness” by the government. Does anyone know anything about this case? Please, this is not a debate about gay marriage, go to Great Debates if you want that. I am just looking for facts here. Thanks so much.
The case is Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967):
–Cliffy
Loving v. Virginia, 338 U.S. 1 (1967). It was an Equal Protection challenge to a miscegenation law in Virginia preventing blacks and whites from marrying. The State argued there was no violation, since blacks and whites were being treated equally. The Court disagreed; the people who were being treated unequal were those who wished to marry someone of another race.
Darn you, Cliffy! 
The only other point I would make is that the opinon never uses the phrase “life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.” So while the Court ruled that a state may not forbid interracial marriage, it did not ground its finding on that magnificent bit of poetry.
Not that anyone asked, but other salient SCOTUS marriage cases include Turner v Safley and Zablocki v Redhail.