Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf
Page Number: 90.0

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

13 

THOMAS, J., dissenting 

recognition and benefits associated with marriage. 

In  a  concession  to  petitioners’  misconception  of  liberty,
the  majority  characterizes  petitioners’  suit  as  a  quest  to 
“find . . . liberty by marrying someone of the same sex and 
having their marriages deemed lawful on the same terms
and conditions as marriages between persons of the oppo-
site sex.”  Ante, at 2.  But “liberty” is not lost, nor can it be
found  in  the  way  petitioners  seek.    As  a  philosophical 
matter, liberty is only freedom from governmental action, 
not  an  entitlement  to  governmental  benefits.   And  as  a 
constitutional matter, it is likely even narrower than that,
encompassing  only  freedom  from  physical  restraint  and 
imprisonment.  The  majority’s  “better  informed  under-
standing  of  how  constitutional  imperatives  define  . . .
liberty,”  ante,  at  19,—better  informed,  we  must  assume, 
than  that  of  the  people  who  ratified  the  Fourteenth
Amendment—runs  headlong  into  the  reality  that  our 
Constitution  is  a  “collection  of  ‘Thou  shalt  nots,’ ”  Reid  v. 
Covert, 354 U. S. 1, 9 (1957) (plurality opinion), not “Thou
shalt provides.” 

III 

The  majority’s  inversion  of  the  original  meaning  of 
liberty will likely cause collateral damage to other aspects
of our constitutional order that protect liberty. 

A 

The majority apparently disregards the political process 
as  a  protection  for  liberty.  Although  men,  in  forming  a
civil  society,  “give  up  all  the  power  necessary  to  the  ends 
for  which  they  unite  into  society,  to  the  majority  of  the 
community,”  Locke  §99,  at  49,  they  reserve  the  authority
to exercise natural liberty within the bounds of laws estab-
lished  by  that  society,  id.,  §22,  at  13;  see  also  Hey  §§52, 
54, at 30–32.  To protect that liberty from arbitrary inter-
ference, they establish a process by which that society can