Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf
Page Number: 56.0

Cite as:  576 U. S. ____ (2015) 

17 

ROBERTS, C. J., dissenting 

single  case  or  other  legal  source  providing  any  basis  for 
such  a  constitutional  right.    None  exists,  and  that  is 
enough to foreclose their claim. 

2 
The  majority  suggests  that  “there  are  other,  more  in-
structive precedents” informing the right to marry.  Ante, 
at 12.  Although not entirely clear, this reference seems to
correspond to a line of cases discussing an implied funda-
mental “right of privacy.”  Griswold, 381 U. S., at 486.  In 
the  first  of  those  cases,  the  Court  invalidated  a  criminal 
law  that  banned  the  use  of  contraceptives.  Id.,  at  485– 
486.  The  Court  stressed  the  invasive  nature  of  the  ban, 
which threatened the intrusion of “the police to search the 
sacred precincts of marital bedrooms.”  Id., at 485.  In the 
Court’s view, such laws infringed the right to privacy in its 
most basic sense: the “right to be let alone.”  Eisenstadt v. 
Baird, 405 U. S. 438, 453–454, n. 10 (1972) (internal quo-
tation marks omitted); see Olmstead v. United States, 277 
U. S. 438, 478 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting).

The Court also invoked the right to privacy in Lawrence 
v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558 (2003), which struck down a Texas 
statute  criminalizing  homosexual  sodomy. 
Lawrence 
relied on the position that criminal sodomy laws, like bans 
on  contraceptives,  invaded  privacy  by  inviting  “unwar-
ranted  government  intrusions”  that  “touc[h]  upon  the 
most  private  human  conduct,  sexual  behavior  . . .  in  the
most private of places, the home.”  Id., at 562, 567. 

Neither  Lawrence  nor  any  other  precedent  in  the  pri-
vacy line of cases supports the right that petitioners assert
here.  Unlike  criminal  laws  banning  contraceptives  and
sodomy,  the  marriage  laws  at  issue  here  involve  no  gov-
ernment  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  fami- 
lies as they see fit.  No one is “condemned to live in loneli-