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Page Number: 61

22 

OBERGEFELL v. HODGES 

ROBERTS, C. J., dissenting 

Then  and  now,  this  assertion  of  the  “harm  principle”
sounds more in philosophy than law.  The elevation of the 
fullest individual self-realization over the constraints that 
society has expressed in law may or may not be attractive
moral  philosophy.  But  a  Justice’s  commission  does  not 
confer  any  special  moral,  philosophical,  or  social  insight 
sufficient  to  justify  imposing  those  perceptions  on  fellow 
citizens  under  the  pretense  of  “due  process.”  There  is 
indeed a process due the people on issues of this sort—the 
democratic  process.  Respecting  that  understanding  re-
quires  the  Court  to  be  guided  by  law,  not  any  particular
school  of  social  thought.    As  Judge  Henry  Friendly  once
put  it,  echoing  Justice  Holmes’s  dissent  in  Lochner,  the 
Fourteenth Amendment does not enact John Stuart Mill’s 
On  Liberty  any  more  than  it  enacts  Herbert  Spencer’s
Social  Statics.    See  Randolph,  Before  Roe  v.  Wade:  Judge 
Friendly’s  Draft  Abortion  Opinion,  29  Harv.  J. L.  &  Pub.
Pol’y 1035, 1036–1037, 1058 (2006).  And it certainly does 
not enact any one concept of marriage.

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 dem-
ocratically  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.  I agree with the majority that 
the “nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in 
our own times.”  Ante, at 11.  As petitioners put it, “times 
can blind.”  Tr. of Oral Arg. on Question 1, at 9, 10.  But to 
blind yourself to history is both prideful and unwise.  “The