Justice Sotomayor pointed to landmark Supreme Court cases that pushed back against discriminatory laws and policies. She cited United States v. Virginia, the 1996 case in which the court struck down Virginia Military Institute’s male-only admissions policy, along with Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 case that declared state laws prohibiting interracial marriage unconstitutional.
“Those laws, too, posed politically fraught and contested questions about race, sex and biology,” the justice wrote. In the interracial marriage case, she wrote as an example, Virginia had argued that if the court intervened in the matter, it would find itself in a “bog of conflicting scientific opinion upon the effects of interracial marriage, and the desirability of preventing such alliances, from the physical, biological, genetic, anthropological, cultural, psychological and sociological point of view.”