State and federal courts increasingly followed Indiana’s lead, holding that the police powers of the states included the authority to regulate marriage as they saw fit. The US Supreme Court, in the 1883 case of Pace v. Alabama, upheld a state law that penalized sex (“fornication”) between men and women of different races more heavily than sex between same-race couples. The law did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, the court said, because the “punishment of each offending person, whether white or black, is the same.”7
