That's not true. The same arguments that are used against SSM today were used to ban interracial marriage back then. Black people weren't denied the right to marry, only the right to marry white people. They always had the ability to marry someone of their own race. Likewise, gays have always had the opportunity to marry someone of an opposite sex. It's essentially identical.
Trying to draw an analogy between Obergefell and Loving seems to all the rage among the proponents of the homosexual agenda. It is a far-fetched and transparent attempt to legitimize an illegitimate dictate. The Virginia statutes at issue in Loving made it a
felony crime for a white person and a colored person to leave the state to get married, and then return to live as man and wife. The Court found both that "penalties for miscegenation arose as an incident to slavery," 388 U.S. 1, 6 (1967), and that the Virginia laws were "designed to maintain White Supremacy." Id. at 11. But
"the clear and central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to eliminate all official state sources of invidious racial discrimination in the States." Id. at 6.
The laws in Loving were challenged on both equal protection and due process grounds. In both analyses, the Court applies its "strict scrutiny" standard where a fundamental right is involved. The Supreme Court had long recognized that the right to marry--universally understood until last week's dictate to mean the right of one man and one woman to marry each other--was fundamental. "Marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival." Id. at 12; See also Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 399 (1923) ("[T]he liberty thus guaranteed [by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment] . . . denotes . . . the right of the individual to marry . . . .")
The state had to show the statutes were necessary--that they served some overriding government purpose independent of invidious race discrimination. But the Court held it did not show that: "there can be no question but that Virginia's miscegenation statutes rest solely upon distinctions drawn according to race," id. at 11, The statutes therefore failed the equal protection challenge.
The Court's due process analysis was similar, and very short:
"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 Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State."
Loving was not that difficult a case, because the invidious racial discrimination the state statutes imposed, for the purpose of maintaining white supremacy, was obviously the very thing it was "the clear and central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment to eliminate." The notion that it was ever the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment to prohibit states from choosing not to extend a government benefit like a marriage license to homosexuals does not even pass the laugh test. The only way to get that result is to ignore the Constitution completely, and make the Fourteenth Amendment say whatever supports the policy you personally favor--which is just what Anthony Kennedy et al. did. Justice Scalia summarized very simply and accurately why Kennedy's noble-sounding fortune cookie gobbledygook in Obergefell is nothing but a weak attempt to disguise an arbitrary, lawless dictate:
When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, every State limited marriage to one man and one woman, and no one doubted the constitutionality of doing so.
That resolves these cases. When it comes to determining the meaning of a vague constitutional provision—such as 'due process of law' or 'equal protection of the laws'—it is unquestionable that the People who ratified that provision did not understand it to prohibit a practice that remained both universal and uncontroversial in the years after ratification. (citing Town of Greece v. Galloway; all emphases added)