CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS, with whom JUSTICE SCALIA and
JUSTICE THOMAS join, dissenting.
This Court is not a legislature. Whether same-sex
marriage is a good idea should be of no concern to us. Under the Constitution,
judges have power to say what the law is, not what it should be. The people who
ratified the Constitution authorized courts to exercise “neither force nor will
but merely judgment.”
Although the policy arguments for extending marriage
to same-sex couples may be compelling, the legal arguments for requiring such
an extension are not. The fundamental right to marry does not include a right
to make State change its definition of marriage. And a State’s decision to
maintain the meaning of marriage that has persisted in every culture throughout
human history can hardly be called irrational. In short, our Constitution does
not enact any one theory of marriage. The people of a State are free to expand
marriage . . . or to retain the historic definition.
Today, however, the Court takes the extraordinary step
of ordering every State to license and recognize same-remarriage. Many people
will rejoice at this decision, and I begrudge none their celebration. But for
those who believe in a government of laws, not of men, the majority’s approach
is deeply disheartening. Supporters of same-remarriage have achieved
considerable success persuading their fellow citizens—through the democratic
process—to adopt their view. That ends today. Five lawyers have closed the
debate and enacted their own vision of marriages a matter of constitutional
law. Stealing this issue from the people will for many cast a cloud over
same-sex marriage, making a dramatic social change that much more difficult to
accept.
The majority’s decision is an act of will, not legal
judgment. The right it announces has no basis in the Constitution or this
Court’s precedent.
Just who do we think we are? It can be tempting for judges to confuse our
own preferences with the requirements of the law. But as this Court has been
reminded throughout our history, the Constitution “is made for people of
fundamentally differing views.”
The majority today neglects that restrained conception
of the judicial role. It seizes for itself a question the Constitution leaves
to the people, at a time when the people are engaged in a vibrant debate on
that question. And it answers that question based not on neutral principles of
constitutional law, but on its own “understanding of what freedom is and must
become.” I have no choice but to
dissent.
Understand well what this dissent is about: It is not
about whether, in my judgment, the institution of marriage should be changed to
include same-sex couples. It is instead about whether, in our democratic
republic, that decision should rest with the people acting through their
elected representatives, or with five lawyers who happen to hold commissions
authorizing them to resolve legal disputes according to law. The Constitution
leaves no doubt about the answer.
This universal definition of marriage as the union of amen
and a woman is no historical coincidence. Marriage did not come about as a
result of a political movement, discovery, disease, war, religious doctrine, or
any other moving force of world history—and certainly not as a result of a
prehistoric decision to exclude gays and lesbians. It arose in the nature of
things to meet a vital need: ensuring
that children are conceived by a mother and father committed to raising them in
the stable conditions of a lifelong relationship.
Therefore, for the good of children and society,
sexual relations that can lead to procreation should occur only between a man
and a woman committed to a lasting bond.
In his first American dictionary, Noah Webster defined
marriage as “the legal union of a man and woman for life,” which served the purposes of “preventing the promiscuous
intercourse of the sexes . . . promoting domestic felicity, and . . . securing
the maintenance and education of children.” An influential 19th-century treatise defined
marriage as “a civil status, existing in one man and one woman legally united
for life for those civil and social purposes which are based in the distinction
of sex.” The first edition of Black’s
Law Dictionary defined marriage as “the civil status of one man and one woman
united in law for life.”
Editorial notes from Caroline: for life is mentioned in most of the definitions provided in the dissent by Chief Justice Roberts, yet nearly 50% of heterosexual marriages end in divorce.
The majority purports to identify four “principles and
traditions” in this Court’s due process precedents that support a fundamental
right for same-sex couples to marry. In
reality, however, the majority’s approach has no basis in principle or
tradition, except for the unprincipled tradition of judicial policymaking . . .
. Stripped of its shiny rhetorical
gloss, the majority’s argument is that the Due Process Clause gives same-sex
couples a fundamental right to marry because it will be good for them and for
society. If I were a legislator, I would certainly consider that view as a
matter of social policy. But as a judge, I find the majority’s position
indefensible as a matter of constitutional law.
A Petitioners’ “fundamental right” claim falls into
the most sensitive category of constitutional adjudication. Petitioners do not
contend that their States’ marriage laws violate an enumerated constitutional
right, such as the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.
They argue instead that the laws violate a right
implied by the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement that “liberty” may not be
deprived without “due process of law.” This Court has interpreted the Due Process
Clause to include a “substantive” component that protects certain liberty
interests against state deprivation “no matter what process is provided.” The theory is that some liberties are “so
rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as
fundamental,” and therefore cannot be deprived without compelling
justification.
By empowering judges to elevate their own policy
judgments to the status of constitutionally protected “liberty,” the Lochner
line of cases left “no alternative to regarding the court as a . . . legislative
chamber.” Eventually, the Court
recognized its error and vowednot to repeat it. “The doctrine that . . . due
process authorizes courts to hold laws unconstitutional when they believe the
legislature has acted unwisely,” we later explained, “has long since been
discarded. We have returned to the original constitutional proposition that
courts do not substitute their social and economic beliefs for the judgment of
legislative bodies, who are elected to pass laws.”
Rejecting Lochner does not require disavowing the doctrine
of implied fundamental rights, and this Court has not done so. But to avoid
repeating Lochner’s error of converting personal preferences into
constitutional mandates, our modern substantive due process cases have stressed
the need for “judicial self-restraint.” Our
precedents have required that implied fundamental rights be “objectively,
deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” and “implicit in the
concept of ordered liberty, such that neither liberty nor justice would exist
if they were sacrificed.”
The only way to ensure restraint in this delicate
enterprise is “continual insistence upon respect for the teachings of history,
solid recognition of the basic values that underlie our society, and wise
appreciation of the great roles [of] the doctrines of federalism and separation
of powers.”
The majority’s driving themes are that marriage is desirable
and petitioners desire it. The opinion describes the “transcendent importance”
of marriage and repeatedly insists that petitioners do not seek to “demean,”
“devalue,”“denigrate,” or “disrespect” the institution. Nobody disputes those points. Indeed, the
compelling personal accounts of petitioners and others like them are likely a
primary reason why many Americans have changed their minds about whether
same-sex couples should be allowed to marry. As a matter of constitutional law,
however, the sincerity of petitioners’ wishes is not relevant.
In Loving, the Court held that racial restrictions on
the right to marry lacked a compelling justification. In Zablocki, restrictions
based on child support debts did not suffice. In Turner, restrictions based on
status as a prisoner were deemed impermissible.
None of the laws at issue in those cases purported to change the core
definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
These precedents say nothing at all about a right to
make a State change its definition of marriage, which is the right petitioners
actually seek here.
Unlike criminal laws banning contraceptives and sodomy,
the marriage laws at issue here involve no government intrusion. They create no
crime and impose no punishment. Same-sex couples remain free to live together, to
engage in intimate conduct, and to raise their families as they see fit. No one is “condemned to live in loneliness” by
the laws challenged in these cases—no one.
[T]he privacy cases provide no support for the majority’s
position, because petitioners do not seek privacy. Quite the opposite, they
seek public recognition of their relationships, along with corresponding
government benefits.
To be fair, the majority does not suggest that its
individual autonomy right is entirely unconstrained. The constraints it sets
are precisely those that accord with its own “reasoned judgment,” informed by
its “new insight” into the “nature of injustice,” which was invisible to all who
came before but has become clear “as we learn [the] meaning” of liberty. The truth is that today’s decision rests on
nothing more than the majority’s own conviction that same-sex couples should be
allowed to marry because they want to, and that “it would disparage their
choices and diminish their personhood to deny them this right.” Whatever force that belief may have as a
matter of moral philosophy, it has no more basis in the Constitution than did
the naked policy preferences adopted in Lochner.
One immediate question invited by the majority’s
position is whether States may retain the definition of marriage as a union of
two people. Although the majority
randomly inserts the adjective “two” in various places, it offers no reason at
all why the two-person element of the core definition of marriage may be
preserved while the man-woman element may not. Indeed, from the standpoint of
history and tradition, a leap from opposite-sex marriage to same-sex marriage
is much greater than one from a two-person union to plural unions, which have
deep roots in some cultures around the world. If the majority is willing to
take the big leap, it is hard to see how it can say no to the shorter one.
If a same-sex couple has the constitutional right to
marry because their children would otherwise “suffer the stigma of knowing their
families are somehow lesser,” why wouldn’t the same reasoning apply to a family
of three or more persons raising children? If not having the opportunity to
marry “serves to disrespect and subordinate” gay and lesbian couples, why
wouldn’t the same “imposition of this disability,” serve to disrespect and
subordinate people who find fulfillment in polyamorous relationships?
The majority’s understanding of due process lays out a
tantalizing vision of the future for Members of this Court: If an unvarying social institution enduring
over all of recorded history cannot inhibit judicial policymaking, what can?
But this approach is dangerous for the rule of law. The purpose of insisting
that implied fundamental rights have roots in the history and tradition of our people
is to ensure that when unelected judges strike down democratically enacted
laws, they do so based on something more than their own beliefs. The Court
today not only overlooks our country’s entire history and tradition but
actively repudiates it, preferring to live only in the heady days of the here
and now.
[T[he marriage laws at issue here do not violate the Equal
Protection Clause, because distinguishing between opposite-sex and same-sex
couples is rationally related to the States’ “legitimate state interest” in
“preserving the traditional institution of marriage.”
Those who founded our country would not recognize the
majority’s conception of the judicial role. They after all risked their lives
and fortunes for the precious right to govern themselves. They would never have
imagined yielding that right on a question of social policy to unaccountable
and unelected judges. And they certainly would not have been satisfied by a
system empowering judges to override policy judgments so long as they do so
after “a quite extensive discussion.” In our democracy, debate about the
content of the law is not an exhaustion requirement to be checked off before
courts can impose their will. “Surely the Constitution does not put either the legislative
branch or the executive branch in the position of a television quiz show
contestant so that when a given period of time has elapsed and a problem
remains unresolved by them, the federal judiciary may press a buzzer and take
its turn at fashioning a solution.”
The Court’s accumulation of power does not occur in a
vacuum. It comes at the expense of the people. When decisions are reached through democratic means, some
people will inevitably be disappointed with the results. But those whose views
do not prevail at least know that they have had their say, and accordingly
are—in the tradition of our political culture—reconciled to the result of a
fair and honest debate. In addition, they can gear up to raise the issue later,
hoping to persuade enough on the winning side to think again. “That is exactly
how our system of government is supposed to work.”
But today the Court puts a stop to all that.
By deciding this question under the Constitution, the
Court removes it from the realm of democratic decision. There will be
consequences to shutting down the political process on an issue of such
profound public significance. Closing debate tends to close minds. People
denied a voice are less likely to accept the ruling of a court on an issue that
does not seem to be the sort of thing courts usually decide. As a thoughtful
commentator observed about another issue, “The political process was moving . .
. , not swiftly enough for advocates of quick, complete change, but
majoritarian institutions were listening and acting. Heavy-handed judicial
intervention was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not
resolved, conflict.”
[H]owever heartened the proponents of same-sex
marriage might be on this day, it is worth acknowledging what they have lost,
and lost forever: the opportunity to win
the true acceptance that comes from persuading their fellow citizens of the
justice of their cause. And they lose this just when the winds of change were
freshening at their backs.
If you are among the many Americans—of whatever sexual
orientation—who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate
today’s decision. Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the
opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the
availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it. I respectfully dissent.
