Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf
Page Number: 164

Cite as:  597 U. S. ____ (2022) 

17 

BREYER, SOTOMAYOR, and KAGAN, JJ., dissenting 

there confronted a claim, based on Washington v. Glucks-
berg, 521 U. S. 702 (1997), that the Fourteenth Amendment 
“must be defined in a most circumscribed manner, with cen-
tral  reference  to  specific  historical  practices”—exactly  the
view today’s majority follows.  Obergefell, 576 U. S., at 671. 
And the Court specifically rejected that view.4  In doing so,
the Court reflected on what the proposed, historically cir-
cumscribed  approach  would  have  meant  for  interracial 
marriage.  See ibid.  The Fourteenth Amendment’s ratifiers 
did not think it gave black and white people a right to marry
each  other.  To  the  contrary,  contemporaneous  practice
deemed that act quite as unprotected as abortion.  Yet the 
Court  in  Loving  v.  Virginia,  388  U. S.  1  (1967),  read  the 
Fourteenth Amendment to embrace the Lovings’ union.  If, 
Obergefell explained, “rights were defined by who exercised 
them  in  the  past,  then  received  practices  could  serve  as 
their own continued justification”—even when they conflict
with “liberty” and “equality” as later and more broadly un-
derstood.  576  U. S.,  at  671.  The  Constitution  does  not 
freeze  for  all  time  the  original  view  of  what  those  rights 
guarantee, or how they apply.

That does not mean anything goes.  The majority wishes
people to think there are but two alternatives: (1) accept the 
original applications of the Fourteenth Amendment and no
others, or (2) surrender to judges’ “own ardent views,” un-
grounded in law, about the “liberty that Americans should 
enjoy.”  Ante, at 14.  At least, that idea is what the majority 
sometimes tries to convey.  At other times, the majority (or, 
rather, most of it) tries to assure the public that it has no 
designs on rights (for example, to contraception) that arose 
only in the back half of the 20th century—in other words, 

—————— 

4 The majority ignores that rejection.  See ante, at 5, 13, 36.  But it is 
unequivocal:  The  Glucksberg  test,  Obergefell  said,  “may  have  been  ap-
propriate” in considering physician-assisted suicide, but “is inconsistent
with the approach this Court has used in discussing other fundamental 
rights, including marriage and intimacy.”  576 U. S., at 671.