Obergefell

Majority — Kennedy

The majority held that the right to marry is a fundamental liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause, and that this right applies equally to same-sex couples for four reasons: (1) personal choices about marriage are central to individual autonomy and self-definition; (2) marriage supports a uniquely important two-person union that same-sex couples have the same right to form; (3) marriage safeguards children and families, and excluding same-sex couples harms and stigmatizes their children; and (4) marriage is a cornerstone of social order, and locking same-sex couples out of it demeans them by treating them as unequal. The Court also reasoned that the Equal Protection Clause reinforces this conclusion, because the marriage laws at issue denied same-sex couples benefits available to opposite-sex couples and imposed a grave and continuing harm rooted in a long history of disapproval. The majority rejected the argument that courts should wait for the democratic process to resolve the issue, noting that individuals harmed by the denial of a fundamental right need not await legislative action, and that waiting — as the Court's experience with Bowers v. Hardwick showed — inflicts real and lasting injury in the meantime.

Dissent reasoning

The four dissenters wrote separately but shared a core argument: the Constitution does not answer the question of same-sex marriage, and the decision belongs to the people through their elected representatives, not to five unelected judges. Chief Justice Roberts argued that the prior "right to marry" precedents only protected access to marriage as traditionally defined — they never authorized courts to redefine the institution itself — and that the majority's freewheeling use of substantive due process (the doctrine that the Due Process Clause protects certain unenumerated rights) echoed the discredited Lochner era, when courts struck down democratically enacted laws based on judges' own policy preferences. Justice Scalia focused on the democratic harm, arguing that when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, every state limited marriage to one man and one woman, making it impossible that the Amendment was understood to prohibit that practice; he warned that allowing nine unelected lawyers to override the people on a question of social policy is fundamentally incompatible with self-governance. Justice Thomas argued that "liberty" in the Due Process Clause historically meant freedom from physical restraint or government interference — not an entitlement to government benefits like a marriage license — and that the petitioners had not been imprisoned or physically restrained, but merely denied a government-conferred status. Justice Alito argued that the traditional understanding of marriage as tied to procreation and child-rearing represents a legitimate, rational basis for state law, that the long-term social consequences of changing that institution are unknown, and that the decision would be used to marginalize Americans who hold traditional views of marriage as a matter of faith or conscience.