Arnold and I got married on June 12th, 2002.  June 12th was a Wednesday. It was a day like any other day.   We picked it because we were broke-broke and University Covenant Church in Davis, CA was kind enough to let us get married for free if we did it on a Wednesday morning.  That is to say there was no great science in picking this day but recently I found out something wonderful:  June 12th is Loving Day.  Loving day celebrates the day that Richard Loving won his court case against the state of Virginia and put and end to the last anti-miscegenation law in the U.S.

Some of you might not know what anti-miscegenation laws are and I’m glad that those laws are so far gone that people don’t even know what they refer to.  Anti-miscegenation laws prohibited interracial marriage.  Richard Loving was white, his wife was black.  One of the primary “reasons” for anti-miscegenation laws was the objective of preventing “crazy-monkey” interracial children, you know like me.

This was in 1967, only 12 years before I was born.

Shoot! The racists were right! I did turn out to be a monkey. Look how my full-blood Asian friend has escaped monkeyism. She does appear to be afflicted with Rodin's "Thinkerism"

But wait! These are two of my "purebread white" friends. It seems that the whole monkey hypothesis is unrelated to race. Frak. Seems like we'll have to figure out another way to put an end to monkeyism since it's not caused by mixed-race breeding.

I’m pretty grateful to Richard Loving and his wife who pounded the last nail into the coffin of anti-miscegenation and to Andrea Perez who set the precedent in Perez v. Sharp which ended anti-miscegenation in California. Because those people were brave enough to stand up for their rights my parents were able to get married 10 years later in 1977 and produce their “half-race monkey baby” aka me.

22 years later I was able to marry Arnold blissfully unaware that Loving Day even existed.

Read a great article about Loving Day here.

Learn more about the Loving Day celebration here.