I agree with what you say.  As a woman of color who was in an interracial marriage, I was shocked to find that until the mid 60’s, my marriage was against the law until the 1967 Supreme Court case of Loving vs. Virginia.

Here is a summary of the case and its outcome:

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Loving v Virginia 388 U.S. 1 (1967)
1) Reference Details
Jurisdiction: United States of America, Supreme Court
Date of decision: June 12 1967
Case Status: Concluded
Link to full text:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=388&invol=1
2) Facts
In June 1958, two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a
white man, were married in the District of Columbia. Shortly afterwards they returned to
Virginia and were charged with violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriages. The
Lovings were victims of direct de jure racial discrimination inherent in the Virginia code,
which prohibited marriage between whites and non-whites.
At the time of the case, Virginia was one of 16 states to prohibit and punish interracial
marriages. They pleaded guilty and were sentenced to one year in jail; however, the judge
suspended the sentence for 25 years on the condition that the couple should not return to
Virginia together during that time.
In his dicta the judge expressed the opinion:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on
separate continents. And but for the inference with his arrangement there would be no cause
for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the
races to mix.”
Following conviction, the Lovings settled in the District of Columbia. In November 1963 the
couple filed a motion in the state trial court to set aside the judgment on the grounds that
the statutes they had violated were unconstitutional and “repugnant to the Fourteenth
Amendment.”
The motion failed. Further appeals followed to the US District Court for the Eastern District
of Virginia, which also rejected the motion, and later to the Supreme Court of Appeals of
Virginia.
In February 1965 the Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the constitutionality of the
miscegenation statutes and affirmed the convictions. The court made reference to its
decision in Naim v Naim (1955) 197 Va. 80, 87 S.E. 2d 749, in which it had held the
miscegenation laws to be legitimate for such purposes as “to preserve the racial integrity of
its citizens,” and to prevent “corruption of blood,” “a mongrel breed of citizens,” and “the
obliteration of racial pride.”
The Lovings appealed again to the US Supreme Court. The court addressed the issue of the
constitutionality of the miscegenation statutes in the light of the Fourteenth Amendment,
which forbids “all invidious racial discrimination.”
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3) Law
State legislation
• 20-59 Virginia Code, which forbade marriage between whites and non-whites.
• 20-58 Virginia Code, which extended this prohibition to couples who left the state in
order to marry and subsequently returned in cohabitation.
National legislation
Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, s. 1 (“Equal Protection Clause”)
forbids discrimination between US citizens and affords all citizens the equal protection of
the laws.
4) Legal Arguments
The State of Virginia
The State of Virginia argued that the Equal Protection Clause should require state penal
laws with an interracial element to apply equally to whites and non-whites, so that
respective violations should be punished to the same degree. Therefore, and in reliance on
this, the question of constitutionality became whether any rational basis existed for
different treatment of interracial marriages and other marriages. Given that the “scientific
evidence is substantially in doubt”, the court should defer to the state’s legislative policy.
Finally, Virginia relied on statements present in the Thirty-ninth Congress at the
introduction of the Fourteenth Amendment which indicated that the Framers did not intend
the Amendment to make unconstitutional state miscegenation laws.
5) Decision
Mr Chief Justice Warren delivering the unanimous opinion of the court, stated:
“The clear and central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to eliminate all official state
sources of invidious racial discrimination in the States.”
Subsequently, the “equal application” argument put forward by Virginia was rejected. It did
not exempt the Virginia Code from the prohibition of racial discrimination contained within
the Fourteenth Amendment. In the courts opinion the statutes should not be upheld merely
because of the existence of a rational purpose behind them. Analogous cases involving
discrimination on grounds other than those of race provided no useful guidance in the
present case.
The court declared racial classifications should be subject to the “most rigid scrutiny” and
must be shown to “be necessary to the accomplishment of some permissible state objective.”
On the facts there was “patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious
racial discrimination which justifie[d] this classification.”
In regards to the statements made in the Thirty-ninth Congress put forward by the State of
Virginia, the court considered that the statements relied on related to specific statutes and
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not to the broader purpose of the Amendment. Such historical statements were inconclusive
and did not corroborate the state’s “equal application” argument.

It is neither prudent, nor appropriate to treat people differently based on their religion, ethnicity, disability, skin color sexual orientation or any other protected class.

These hundreds and thousands of men and women who wear the uniforms of the respective branches of service, who go to war on behalf of their country, who sacrific their lives in conflict deserve to be treated better than the United States Government presently treats them.