Many social media users changed their profiles in ways to declare their support of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or LGBT, equality, changing their display picture to the Human Rights Campaign’s equality symbol. The logo now has become a controversial cultural symbol for larger LGBT equality.

Had Facebook and Twitter been a primary medium of news sharing and communication in the 1960s, would the same have happened?

In January 1959, Mildred and Richard Loving were taken from their home in the middle of the night and put on legal trial for violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which made interracial marriage a crime. The recently-wed couple pled guilty and were sentenced to one year in prison, or could choose to avoid punishment by leaving Virginia.

The Loving’s left the state, but in 1964 decided to challenge the ruling in appellate court. In 1967, after a series of relative failures at the appellate level, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. The decision was quick, clean and unanimous: marriage discrimination based on race is unconstitutional.

Chief Justice Earl Warren said in the court’s unanimous written opinion, “Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival… To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Loving v. Virginia now is seen as a major success in the Civil Rights Movement, and rightfully so. Court-enforced marriage discrimination by race is almost unfathomable today, just one short generation after its final days of enforcement.

The decision now lives in legal fame — taught in nearly every law and public policy academic program. Beyond the fields of law and history, the case is celebrated on June 12 (the day of the ruling in 1967), commonly called Loving Day.

Replace the constructed “racial categorizations” with the constructed “sexual orientations” and the arguments and public’s inclinations surrounding the cases become eerily similar. I have little doubt the explosion of social media that would have surrounded the oral arguments of Loving v. Virginia would have been comparable to the energy accompanying Hollingsworth v. Perry and Windsor v. U.S. Given the decade-spanning rising tide of support for LGBT equality and the timing of the two pending cases, I also have little doubt that, 50 years from now, opponents of Perry’s and Windsor’s legal claims will be seen as just as antiquated and absurd as opponents of Loving’s legal claims are seen today.

Prior to her death in 2008, even Mildred Loving agreed the comparisons between the cases are apt. In July 2007, on the 40th anniversary of the Loving decision, Mildred Loving proudly affirmed, “I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry … I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight, seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.”

Indeed. However, it must be remembered that Loving v. Virginia by no means ended the Civil Rights Movement. In the decade following 1967 Loving ruling, many pivotal causes were yet to be addressed.

While able to marry, many of the physical necessities of living — living space, employment, etc. — still were structurally discriminatory in their distributions and enforcements.

In 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, protecting the rental, ownership and financing of a house from racial discrimination. It was not until 1991, when President Bush signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, that intentional employment discrimination by race was made explicitly illegal.

Likewise, no law exists protecting against discrimination in employment, renting or home-ownership based on sexual orientation. There is no equivalent to the Civil Rights Act for sexual orientation, and none of the federal legal protections that it provides.

Two years from now, structural inequality around constructed sexual orientations still will exist. There certainly will be a long road of progress and setbacks to the movement after the cases, no matter what the court decides.

But, for now, the red equality signs put me in a very Loving mood.

Tyler Gross is a guest columnist at The State News and a social relations and policy junior. Reach him at grosstyl@msu.edu.