Held: The Fourteenth Amendment requires a State to
license a marriage between two people of the same sex and to recognize a
marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully
licensed and performed out-of-State.
JUSTICE
KENNEDY delivered the opinion of the Court.
The Constitution promises liberty to all within its
reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons,
within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.
Rising from the most basic human needs, marriage is
essential to our most profound hopes and aspirations. The centrality of
marriage to the human condition makes it unsurprising that the institution has
existed for millennia and across civilizations. Since the dawn of history,
marriage has transformed strangers into relatives, binding families and
societies together. Confucius taught that marriage lies at the foundation of
government.
The ancient origins of marriage confirm its
centrality, but it has not stood in isolation from developments in law and
society. The history of marriage is one of both continuity and change. That
institution—even as confined to opposite-sex relations—has evolved over time.
For example, marriage was once viewed as an arrangement by the couple’s parents
based on political, religious, and financial concerns; but by the time of the
Nation’s founding it was understood to be a voluntary contract between a man
and a woman. As the role and status of
women changed, the institution further evolved. Under the centuries-old
doctrine of coverture, a married man and woman were treated by the State as a single,
male-dominated legal entity. As women gained legal, political, and property
rights, and as society began to understand that women have their own equal
dignity, the law of coverture was abandoned.
These and other developments in the institution of marriage over the
past centuries were not mere superficial changes. Rather, they worked deep transformations in
its structure, affecting aspects of marriage long viewed by many as essential.
Two Terms ago, in United States v. Windsor, 570 U. S.
___ (2013), this Court invalidated DOMA to the extent it barred the Federal
Government from treating same-sex marriages as valid even when they were lawful
in the State where they were licensed. DOMA, the Court held, impermissibly
disparaged those same-sex couples “who wanted to affirm their commitment to one
another before their children, their family, their friends, and their
community.”
Under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment, no State shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property,
without due process of law.” The fundamental liberties protected by this Clause
include most of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights. In addition these liberties extend to certain
personal choices central to individual dignity and autonomy, including intimate
choices that define personal identity and beliefs.
The nature of injustice is that we may not always see
it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights
and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in
all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter
protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.
When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections
and a received legal stricture, a claim to liberty must be addressed.
Applying these established tenets, the Court has long
held the right to marry is protected by the Constitution. In Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1, 12
(1967), which invalidated bans on interracial unions, a unanimous Court held
marriage is “one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit
of happiness by free men.” The Court reaffirmed that holding in Zablocki v. Redhail, 434 U. S. 374, 384
(1978), which held the right to marry was burdened by a law prohibiting fathers
who were behind on child support from marrying. The Court again applied this
principle in Turner v. Safley, 482 U.
S. 78, 95 (1987), which held the right to marry was abridged by regulations
limiting the privilege of prison inmates to marry. Over time and in other
contexts, the Court has reiterated that the right to marry is fundamental under
the Due Process Clause.
This analysis compels the conclusion that same-sex
couples may exercise the right to marry. The four principles and traditions to
be discussed demonstrate that the reasons marriage is fundamental under the
Constitution apply with equal force to same-sex couples.
A first premise of the Court’s relevant precedents is
that the right to personal choice regarding marriage is inherent in the concept
of individual autonomy. This abiding connection between marriage and liberty is
why Loving invalidated interracial marriage bans under the Due Process
Clause. Like choices concerning
contraception, family relationships, procreation, and child rearing, all of
which are protected by the Constitution, decisions concerning marriage are
among the most intimate that an individual can make. Indeed, the Court has noted it would be
contradictory “to recognize a right of privacy with respect to other matters of
family life and not with respect to the decision to enter the relationship that
is the foundation of the family in our society.”
Choices about marriage shape an individual’s
destiny. As the Supreme Judicial Court
of Massachusetts has explained, because “it fulfils yearnings for security,
safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity, civil marriage is
an esteemed institution, and the decision whether and whom to marry is among
life’s momentous acts of self-definition.”
The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring
bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression,
intimacy, and spirituality. This is true for all persons, whatever their sexual
orientation. There is dignity in the
bond between two men or two women who seek to marry and in their autonomy to
make such profound choices. Cf. Loving, supra, at 12 (“[T]he freedom to marry,
or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot
be infringed by the State”).
A second principle in this Court’s jurisprudence is
that the right to marry is fundamental because it supports a two-person union
unlike any other in its importance to the committed individuals.
Suggesting that marriage is a right “older than the
Bill of Rights,” Griswold described marriage this way: “Marriage is a coming
together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the
degree of being sacred. It is an association that promotes a way of life, not
causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not
commercial or social projects.
Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely
person might call out only to find no one there. It offers the hope of
companionship and understanding and assurance that while both still live there
will be someone to care for the other.
A third basis for protecting the right to marry is
that it safeguards children and families and thus draws meaning from related
rights of child rearing, procreation, and education. The Court has recognized
these connections by describing the varied rights as a unified whole: “[T]he
right to ‘marry, establish a home and bring up children’ is a central part of
the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause.”
Under the laws of the several States, some of
marriage’s protections for children and families are material. But marriage
also confers more profound benefits. By giving recognition and legal structure
to their parents’ relationship, marriage allows children “to understand the
integrity and closeness of their own family and its concord with other families
in their community and in their daily lives.” Marriage also affords the
permanency and stability important to children’s best interests.
As all parties agree, many same-sex couples provide loving
and nurturing homes to their children, whether biological or adopted. Excluding same-sex couples from marriage thus
conflicts with a central premise of the right to marry. Without the
recognition, stability, and predictability marriage offers, their children
suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser. They also
suffer the significant material costs of being raised by unmarried parents, relegated
through no fault of their own to a more difficult and uncertain family life.
The marriage laws at issue here thus harm and humiliate the children of
same-sex couples.
That is not to say the right to marry is less
meaningful for those who do not or cannot have children. An ability, desire, or
promise to procreate is not and has not been a prerequisite for a valid
marriage in any State. In light of precedent protecting the right of a married
couple not to procreate, it cannot be said the Court or the States have
conditioned the right to marry on the capacity or commitment to procreate. The
constitutional marriage right has many aspects, of which childbearing is only
one.
Fourth and finally, this Court’s cases and the
Nation’s traditions make clear that marriage is a keystone of our social order.
Alexis de Tocqueville recognized this truth on his travels through the United
States almost two centuries ago:
“There is certainly no country in the world where the
tie of marriage is so much respected as in America . . . [W]hen the American
retires from the turmoil of public life to the bosom of his family, he finds in
it the image of order and of peace . . . . [H]e afterwards carries [that image]
with him into public affairs.”
Marriage is “the foundation of the family and of
society, without which there would be neither civilization nor progress.”
Marriage remains a building block of our national
community. For that reason, just as a couple vows to support each
other, so does society pledge to support the couple, offering symbolic
recognition and material benefits to protect and nourish the union. Indeed,
while the States are in general free to vary the benefits they confer on all
married couples, they have throughout our history made marriage the basis for
an expanding list of governmental rights, benefits, and responsibilities. These
aspects of marital status include: taxation; inheritance and property rights;
rules of intestate succession; spousal privilege in the law of evidence;
hospital access; medical decision making authority; adoption rights; the rights
and benefits of survivors; birth and death certificates; professional ethics
rules; campaign finance restrictions; workers’ compensation benefits; health
insurance; and child custody, support, and visitation rules.
Same-sex couples are consigned to an instability many
opposite-sex couples would deem intolerable in their own lives. As the State
itself makes marriage all the more precious by the significance it attaches to
it, exclusion from that status has the effect of teaching that gays and
lesbians are unequal in important respects. It demeans gays and lesbians for
the State to lock them out of a central institution of the Nation’s society.
Same-sex couples, too, may aspire to the transcendent purposes of marriage and
seek fulfillment in its highest meaning.
The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed
natural and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the
fundamental right to marry is now manifest.
The right to marry is fundamental as a matter of
history and tradition, but rights come not from ancient sources alone. They
rise, too, from a better informed understanding of how constitutional
imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era. Many who deem
same-sex marriage to be wrong reach that conclusion based on decent and
honorable religious or philosophical premises, and neither they nor their
beliefs are disparaged here. But when
that sincere, personal opposition becomes enacted law and public policy, the
necessary consequence is to put the imprimatur of the State itself on an
exclusion that soon demeans or stigmatizes those whose own liberty is then
denied. Under the Constitution, same-sex couples seek in marriage the same
legal treatment as opposite-sex couples, and it would disparage their choices
and diminish their personhood to deny them this right.
The right of same-sex couples to marry that is part of
the liberty promised by the Fourteenth Amendment is derived, too, from that
Amendment’s guarantee of the equal protection of the laws.
In interpreting the Equal Protection Clause, the Court
has recognized that new insights and societal understandings can reveal
unjustified inequality within our most fundamental institutions that once
passed unnoticed and unchallenged.
These considerations lead to the conclusion that the
right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person,
and under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth
Amendment couples of the same-sex may not be deprived of that right and that
liberty. The Court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental
right to marry. No longer may this liberty be denied to them.
The dynamic of our constitutional system is that
individuals need not await legislative action before asserting a fundamental
right. The Nation’s courts are open to injured individuals who come to them to
vindicate their own direct, personal stake in our basic charter. An individual
can invoke a right to constitutional protection when he or she is harmed, even
if the broader public disagrees and even if the legislature refuses to act. The
idea of the Constitution “was to withdraw certain subjects from the
vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of
majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be
applied by the courts.” This is why
“fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote; they depend on the outcome
of no elections.”
The petitioners’ stories make clear the urgency of the
issue they present to the Court. James Obergefell now asks whether Ohio can
erase his marriage to John Arthur for all time. April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse
now ask whether Michigan may continue to deny them the certainty and stability
all mothers desire to protect their children, and for them and their children
the childhood years will pass all too soon. Ijpe DeKoe and Thomas Kostura now ask whether
Tennessee can deny to one who has served this Nation the basic dignity of
recognizing his New York marriage. Properly presented with the petitioners’
cases, the Court has a duty to address these claims and answer these questions.
The respondents also argue allowing same-sex couples to
wed will harm marriage as an institution by leading to fewer opposite-sex
marriages. This may occur, the respondents contend, because licensing same-sex
marriage severs the connection between natural procreation and marriage. That
argument, however, rests on a counterintuitive view of opposite-sex couple’s
decision making processes regarding marriage and parenthood. Decisions about
whether to marry and raise children are based on many personal, romantic, and
practical considerations; and it is unrealistic to conclude that an
opposite-sex couple would choose not to marry simply because same-sex couples
may do so.
Finally, it must be emphasized that religions, and
those who adhere to religious doctrines, may continue to advocate with utmost,
sincere conviction that, by divine precepts, same-sex marriage should not be
condoned. The First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons
are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so
fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths, and to their own deep aspirations
to continue the family structure they have long revered. The same is true of
those who oppose same-sex marriage for other reasons. In turn, those who
believe allowing same-sex marriage is proper or indeed essential, whether as a
matter of religious conviction or secular belief, may engage those who disagree
with their view in an open and searching debate. The Constitution, however,
does not permit the State to bar same-sex couples from marriage on the same
terms as accorded to couples of the opposite sex.
These cases also present the question whether the
Constitution requires States to recognize same-sex marriages validly performed
out of State. As made clear by the case of Obergefell and Arthur, and by that
of DeKoe and Kostura, the recognition bans inflict substantial and continuing harm
on same-sex couples. Being married in
one State but having that valid marriage denied in another is one of “the most
perplexing and distressing complication[s]” in the law of domestic relations.
The Court, in this decision, holds same-sex couples
may exercise the fundamental right to marry in all States. It follows that the
Court also must hold—and it now does hold—that there is no lawful basis for a
State to refuse to recognize a lawful same-sex marriage performed in another
State on the ground of its same-sex character.
No union is more profound than marriage, for it
embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family.
In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they
were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies
a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and
women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do
respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for
themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded
from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in
the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the
Sixth Circuit is reversed.
It is so ordered.
