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A clear example is the case of Perez v. Sharp (1948), a California supreme court case in which it was ruled that interracial couples have a fundamental civil right to marry. In reaching that conclusion, though, the court heard arguments that contained plenty of those trigger words.

In that case, Andrea Perez, a “white person,” and Sylvester Davis, a “Negro,” sought to compel the County Clerk of Los Angeles County to issue them a certificate of registry and a license to marry. The Country Clerk refused to issue the certificate and license, invoking Civil Code, section 69, which provided: “... no license may be issued authorizing the marriage of a white person with a Negro, mulatto, Mongolian or member of the Malay race.”

According to the opinion, Perez and Davis, members of the Roman Catholic Church, “contend that the statutes in question are unconstitutional on the grounds that they prohibit the free exercise of their religion and deny to them the right to participate fully in the sacraments of that religion … They maintain that since the church has no rule forbidding marriages between Negroes and Caucasians, they are entitled to receive the sacrament of matrimony.”

The clerk justified his actions on grounds similar to those set forth in the case of Scott v. State, (Georgia, 1869), that reads, “The amalgamation of the races is not only unnatural, but is always productive of deplorable results. Our daily observation shows us, that the offspring of these unnatural connections are generally sickly and effeminate, and that they are inferior in physical development and strength, to the full blood of either race.”

The Clerk contended “Negroes, and impliedly the other races…are inferior mentally to Caucasians,” and that “persons wishing to marry in contravention of race barriers come from the ‘dregs of society’ and that their progeny will therefore be a burden on the community.”

Just in case those arguments proved ineffective, the clerk also contended, “even if the races specified in the statute are not by nature inferior to the Caucasian race, the statute can be justified as a means of diminishing race tension and preventing the birth of children who might become social problems.”

In the end, Perez and Davis won the judgment. “In summary,” Justice Traynor concluded in his opinion, “we hold that sections 60 and 69 are not only too vague and uncertain to be enforceable regulations of a fundamental right, but that they violate the equal protection of the laws clause of the United States Constitution by impairing the right of individuals to marry on the basis of race and by arbitrarily and unreasonably discriminating against certain racial groups.”

Chief Justice Gibson concurred, as did Justice Edmonds, who said, “I agree with the conclusion that marriage is “something more than a civil contract subject to regulation by the state; it is a fundamental right of free men.” Moreover, it is grounded in the fundamental principles of Christianity.”

But it’s Justice Carter’s concurring opinion that is most often quoted for its reason and eloquence. He said, ”If the right to marry is a fundamental right, then it must be conceded that an infringement of that right by means of a racial restriction is an unlawful infringement of one's liberty…” He added, “It is only ignorance, prejudice and intolerance which denies it…The rest of the world never has understood and never will understand why and how a nation, built on the premise that all men are created equal, can three times send the flower of its manhood to war for the truth of this premise and still fail to carry it out within its own borders.”

Sixty years and more than a few wars later, we’ll still trying to understand it.

But something happened between then and now. Remember the Lovings? They, too, won in the end. They went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967, and that highest court reversed the 1958 convictions and invalidated Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute.

The Loving case is a landmark case, just as important today as it was nearly 40 years ago. Loving was used as precedent in the groundbreaking case of Goodridge v. The Department of Public Heath, in which the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled on November 18, 2003 that there is no state constitutional basis for denying lesbian and gay couples the right to marry.

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