Today's newspapers carry the obituary for the somewhat accidental civil rights pioneer Mildred Loving, who died last Friday at 68. Loving and her late husband Richard were the plaintiffs in one of the most important civil rights cases ever to reach the Supreme Court. Their exquisitely- and aptly-named case, Loving v. Virginia, brought what was essentially an "equal protection of the law" challenge to a Virginia state law that not only banned but also criminalized interracial marriage. The court unanimously declared that Virginia's anti-miscegenation law was unconstitutional because it violated the Fourteenth Amendment's requirement that state laws not discriminate on the basis of race.

The Supreme Court's decision in Loving was a triumph for not only the Lovings, but for the rights and freedoms of all citizens: it determined that states could not prohibit people from marrying whomever they loved just because they happened to be of a different race. Though the Lovings lived in Virginia, they got married instead in Washington D.C., which did not have an anti-miscegenation law. However, Virginia's law provided that out-of-state interracial marriages were invalid in Virginia. Several weeks later, on July 11, 1958, the New York Times reports, they were arrested in bed for having violated Virginia's Racial Integrity Act. After they pled guilty, they moved to Washington to remain together, but eventually "could stand the ostracism no longer." The ACLU brought their case to the Supreme Court -- and, nine years after they were arrested, the Lovings won.

The entire nation owes a huge debt to Mildred Loving, an unassuming litigant who wanted to marry and live with the man she loved -- and to do so in the community she called her home. Several years ago, at the height of the controversy centering on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's decision declaring marriage (including gay marriage) a right protected by the state's constitution, I wrote in the Boston Phoenix that the road to equal marriage rights in Massachusetts was paved by Mildred and Richard Loving. The Supreme Court was right in 1967 to ensure marriage rights to interracial couples, and the Massachusetts SJC was right in 2004 to ensure marriage rights to same-sex couples. Our society has come a long way since the time of anti-miscegenation laws, but anti-same-sex-marriage laws like the federal Defense of Marriage Act infringe gay Americans' rights just as fundamentally as Virginia's old law once did. And when one group of citizens is treated differently under the law from others, for no demonstrable reason based in logic and experience, equality under the law cannot be said to prevail. I predict that someday courts all throughout the country will recognize that these laws raise very similar constitutional questions as did the law challenged in Loving v. Virginia. For that, the Lovings will again – or still – merit our thanks. May these modern-day heroes for liberty and equality rest in peace.

The ACLU has found itself a strong test case for determining whether a student’s right to privacy is violated when he or she is “outed” to the community by their school. A principal in Memphis, Tennessee, apparently in order to cut down on public displays of affection in school, asked her staff to put together a list of school couples, both straight and gay, and then posted that list publicly, thereby outing an untold number of student romances, including that of a 17-year old gay student, who is now suing for damages. It is a somewhat complex case, from a legal point of view, not only because gay and straight couples were treated equally by the overbearing principal, but because the gay couple obviously was sufficiently public about their romance to broadcast it within the school community and end up on the list. So from the point of view of a complaint for discriminatory treat, and for violation of privacy, they might have an uphill climb.

The ACLU took on a similar case in 2005, involving a student in California who was outed when her principal called her mother and complained about her kissing and holding hands with a female classmate in school. In that case, a federal judge that the student had "sufficiently alleged a legally protected privacy interest in information about her sexual orientation.”

Regardless of how one feels about the privacy of students inside the schoolhouse gates, one has to acknowledge the bizarreness of this war on cuddling. Surely there are more pressing concerns in our public schools than too much affection – especially of the reciprocal, monogamous sort. It causes one to wonder why schools aren't spending more time and energy teaching the kids math.

        There has been a lot of bleating from those who believe that boycotting the Olympic Games over The People’s Republic of China’s abysmal human rights record is in poor taste because the Olympiad is not a political event. Personally, I think that, since the Olympiad pitches itself as a symbol of fraternity and respect for individual achievement, a boycott over the choice of China as a host country is not entirely unreasonable. I am, however, sufficiently flexible on the subject to see the point made by athletes who see the games as apolitical.

But what does really irk me about this issue, above all else, is when this “the Olympics is not a political event” retort is used to criticize the protests that have followed the Olympic Torch’s journey from Athens to Beijing.

Loud and visible public demonstrations are not the equivalent of a boycott, but are simply an exercise in free speech that seems perfectly appropriate – indeed, a bit on the mild side – given the provocation from Beijing. After all, not only has the PRC oppressed and suppressed Tibet since the invasion of 1949, but, according to recent reports, the Communist Chinese overlords have undertaken a program of attempted political indoctrination in order to convert the Tibetan Buddhist teenagers into PRC-thought and away from the ancient teachings of their religion and of their leader, the Dalai Lama.

            Governmental attempts to coerce expressions of belief, even more than attempts to suppress the expression of what people actually do believe, is perhaps the most serious invasion of mind, spirit and conscience that any government could possibly undertake. It harkens back to the days of the Inquisition, when human beings were tortured in order to make them renounce their beliefs and then mouth the beliefs of others. Today, we have remnants of such obscene practices in, for example, the mandatory sensitivity and diversity training sessions which many starting college freshmen are forced to attend when they first arrive on campus, or the required thought reform sessions to which students are sentenced by campus kangaroo courts as punishment for uttering words (we call it free speech, but campus administrators call it “harassment”) that might be viewed as insulting to some group on campus.

            Indeed, in our own country, the United States Supreme Court, in one of its most magnificent opinions on behalf of liberty, declared unconstitutional a state’s requirement that students be forced to pledge allegiance to the flag. That would be a violation of a student’s rights to both free speech and free conscience, declared Justice Robert Jackson for the court majority in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943). This opinion was rendered, it must be noted, during World War II, when pressures for patriotic symbols and expression were at their strongest.

            As long as Tibet’s PRC masters exercise their raw power in both suppressing the Tibetan people and in forcefully “re-educating” that beleaguered nation’s religious figures, demonstrations on the occasion of the coming Olympics are a perfectly appropriate – indeed, understated – way for free people to make a critically important point about human freedom and those who suppress it.

            The progress of freedom and legal equality is measured in sometimes subtle ways.

            A couple of days ago, I received in the mail my monthly copy of OUT magazine, a publication aimed toward the gay community but having articles of more general interest. It came wrapped, as it always does, in an opaque gray plastic wrapper, with no indication on the label as to the name or nature of the publication within. But this time it came with a notice inscribed on the wrapper:

            DROP PLASTIC WRAP.
            NOW YOU MAY OPT TO GO-GREEN AND
            DROP THE PASTIC WRAP ON THIS MAGAZINE
            GO TO: www.lipmagazines.com/plasticwrap AND
            CHOOSE THE NO-PLASTIC WRAP OPTION.

            A visit to the Website notifies the subscriber that choosing the option that avoids the wasteful plastic wrap entails a mailing label stuck on the magazine cover itself, allowing anyone seeing the magazine as it makes its way through the mail system and to ultimate delivery to the subscriber, to understand that a gay-themed magazine is being delivered to the subscriber. This seems to be a new phase of the effort to achieve not only an out-of-the-closet society, but a society in which the right to subscribe, and to read, is no longer to be hedged by the fear of subscribers and readers’ being outed or even merely pigeon-holed by his or her choice of reading material.

The next sign of progress in achieving gay equality will come when subscription and renewal letters from gay magazines, as well as fund-raising letters from gay rights groups, will stop referring to the recipients with such lines as “the need to support your own.” In fact, where equal rights are at stake, everyone is “our own.” The assumption that only gay people are interested in achieving full legal equality on the basis of sexual orientation, or that equal rights for the gay community does not have larger meaning to the entire society, bespeaks a narrowness that one fervently wishes will be overcome. Since straight folks contribute money to the gay rights cause, their loyalty to equal rights should be recognized in such fund-raising mailings.

         Before the court this month is the disastrous McCain-Feingold Act of 2002, the most momentous and well-publicized, and also the most futile, of the many congressional efforts over the last thirty years to limit the extent to which money influences politics. In a 2003 decision that has been rightly derided by free speech advocates, the court by a vote of 5-4 upheld the constitutionality of the Act’s ban on “soft money” and on TV ads that mention a candidate for federal office within 60 days of a general election.

This time around, the court is debating McCain-Feingold’s exception for certain “issue” ads, which are not considered political endorsements when they do not specifically mention the name of a candidate. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to separate ads touting issues from ads touting pols who support those issues. The insanity of this murky attempted boundary is what has occupied an enormous amount of time of judges, bureaucrats, and lawyers – all without achieving any clarity. The constitutionality of this provision is being challenged by the nonprofit Wisconsin Right to Life, an anti-abortion group.  The FEC penalized the group last year for airing ads urging Wisconsinites to contact the state's two U.S. senators and tell them not to filibuster President Bush's judicial nominees. Because one of those senators, Democrat Russell Feingold (coincidentally, one of the campaign finance reforms act’s namesakes), was up for reelection, the group was told that the inclusion of Feingold’s name turned its grass-roots anti-abortion campaign into an "electioneering communication" that could not be legally aired before the election.

          As the Wisconsin Right to Life example proves, the McCain-Feingold act, although well-intentioned, clearly tramples on one of the most fundamentally important guarantees of the Constitution: the right for a citizen to criticize one’s government and to petition for what the First Amendment calls “a redress of grievances.” In my view, there needs to be a major shift in the debate over fair elections and a newfound emphasis on restoring some sense of voter and candidate equality and access to the system without sacrificing free speech. Lawmakers should repeal campaign financing restrictions and instead institute a modest system of public financing of campaigns. Every candidate who demonstrates his or her credibility by collecting enough signatures would be eligible for public money to run a campaign. The American Civil Liberties Union has been proposing a system like this for decades, thus far to no avail. What the current system has gotten us is not a diminution in the role of money in politics – that would be simply impossible to achieve in a free society – but, rather, a system where the benefits of incumbency are huge because current officeholders have so much more access to money and to the news media than do the challengers. If we want to throw the bums out, we need to open up the system by getting rid of McCain-Feingold and other such ill-considered and unconstitutional restrictions on the free speech rights of the electorate.

 Meanwhile, Congress should abandon this absurd notion that support for issues and support for candidates can, or should, be separated. Citizens and political groups should be able to vocally support candidates however they see fit.. Let free speech and fair elections both flourish.

When rules are written to cut off money in one arena, that money inevitably finds its way into the electoral system through a back door. It’s a constant game of cat-and-mouse. Only a strictly enforced publicly funded campaign system could put this tiresome game to an end and, incidentally, put some of the army of campaign finance lawyers out of business.

        We have had some form of campaign finance restrictions for many decades, with the restrictions becoming stricter and stricter with each attempt at “reform.” In order to assess the impact of this effort to “wring big money out of politics,” one has simply to compare the quality of our politics, our political discourse, and our office-holders, with each passing decade. I rest my case.

         At the risk of being considered impolite, I can’t help but add that every one of the five Justices who upheld the ban on a second trimester abortion procedure (in defiance of expert medical opinion) are Catholic.  Four are conservative Catholics.   I expect that some consider the mere mention of this obvious but salient fact an example of religious bigotry, but advocates of more religion in government who praise the influence of sectarian religious ideals on public policy should be prepared to hear it questioned.  And, I’m not suggesting that judges should, or could, jettison their religious convictions on appointment to the bench.  I’m pointing out the need for religious diversity in the judiciary, given the inevitable influence of religious beliefs on individual morality and opinion.  Isn’t it obvious that in a pluralistic country, law should not reflect and the Supreme Court should not be dominated by one sectarian point of view?