Writing as part of a larger symposium on the fortieth anniversary of the Loving decision, Ball considers the detail that the plaintiffs in that famous case were also parents. Laws against miscegenation were often justified in terms of the potential offspring of such unions, and Ball finds that the concerns about children are echoed in today's conservative arguments against same-sex marriage. Both share the feature of essentializing a dualistic understanding of race and gender, leading the author to conclude that while most courts reject the relevance of Loving to same-sex marriage, "that case would seem to be highly relevant to an equality-based challenge to same-sex marriage bans given that the optimal parenting justification for those bans is grounded ... in the idea of natural, essential, and predetermined differences between men and women that is similar to the notion of natural, essential, and predetermined differences between whites and blacks that served as the normative foundation for the antimiscegenation regime."

Building on the author’s previous work asserting the morality of gay rights, this article argues that anti-gay adoption statutes in Florida and Oklahoma are immoral because they tangibly harm children (often relegating them to the foster care system) and use children as a means to send a message of disapproval about homosexuality.