Every time I hear a politician invoke states rights I think of two brave people, Mildred and Richard Loving.

RICHMOND, Va. – Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday…

Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.

They had married in Washington in 1958, when she was 18. Returning to their Virginia hometown, they were arrested within weeks and convicted on charges of “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth,” according to their indictments.

The threat of doing time in a Southern jail did not deter the Lovings from standing up for their rights. They filed suit and initiated the court case that ultimately invalidated all state laws against interracial marriage. They had to fight for a right that my husband and I have been able to take for granted the right to have our marriage recognized in our own country South as well as North.

I think that some of the deep hostility to ‘activist judges’ stems from decisions that affirm basic rights of citizenship not subject to denial or modification by the state. There are still those who want to turn the state to support their personal morality, and they feel that affirming individual rights takes something away from them. They feel robbed and disrespected, because people who are different from them are equal under the law.

Just eight years ago, the last state law against interracial marriage was voted down, decades after such laws became unenforceable.

MONTGOMERY, Alabama (AP) — Alabama voters on Tuesday repealed the state’s century-old ban against interracial marriage, an unenforceable but embarrassing throwback to the state’s segregationist past.

The vote was running 59 percent to 41 percent, with 58 percent of the voted counted.

The vote removed the dubious distinction of Alabama being the only state in the country with such a relic from the segregated South remaining in its constitution.

Alabama became the last state with such language in its organic law in 1998 when South Carolina voters approved a measure to remove similar wording from their state’s constitution. In South Carolina, about 62 percent of voters favored lifting the ban.

Major Cox of Bullock County said he was impressed that Alabama voters officially made his 20-year marriage to Margaret Meier legal. Cox is black and his wife is white.

“I think we are well on the way to removing some of the stigma placed on Alabama. I think we may get to the point where we don’t have to classify ourselves. I don’t wake up in the morning thinking ‘oh my God I’m married to a white person’,” Cox said.

Meier said she had been worried Alabama voters might decide in the privacy of the polling booth to keep the ban.

Apparently, more than a third of the voters did vote to keep a constitutional ban on interracial marriage.

With all the talk about ‘special privileges’ there are a good number of people who feel that their marriage loses value if it’s an equal right. There are people who will go to the voting booth and try to keep a law in their constitution that invalidates the legal marriage of their neighbors. No matter that the law can’t be enforced–they want to keep marriage ‘special’. They would keep that law as a relic of when white was right–and pull it out and use it if the day comes when racism can again be written into the law of the land.

We live in a better America today because of people like Mildred and Richard Loving, who took a stand for marriage equality and won a victory for us all. Rest in Peace, Mildred, we won’t forget.