Supreme Court Decisions
I am glad that the Supreme Court sustained the legality of same-sex marriage across the country. It is my profound belief, based on the logic that marriage is a mutual choice between any two people who decide to unite their lives in love, that marriage should not be only allowed between persons of opposite sexes. Marriage is not purely for the
( Read more... )
"Finally, incorporation of the right will work a significant disruption in the constitutional allocation of decisionmaking authority, thereby interfering with the Constitution’s ability to further its objectives.
First, on any reasonable accounting, the incorporation of the right recognized in Heller would amount to a significant incursion on a traditional and important area of state concern, altering the constitutional relationship between the States and the Federal Government. Private gun regulation is the quintessential exercise of a State’s “police power”-i.e., the power to “protec[t] … the lives, limbs, health, comfort, and quiet of all persons, and the protection of all property within the State,” by enacting “all kinds of restraints and burdens” on both “persons and property.” Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, 62 (1873) (internal quotation marks omitted). The Court has long recognized that the Constitution grants the States special authority to enact laws pursuant to this power. See, e.g., Medtronic, Inc. v. Lohr, 518 U. S. 470, 475 (1996) (noting that States have “great latitude” to use their police powers (internal quotation marks omitted)); Metropolitan Life Ins. Co. v. Massachusetts, 471 U. S. 724, 756 (1985). A decade ago, we wrote that there is “no better example of the police power” than “the suppression of violent crime.” United States v. Morrison, 529 U. S. 598, 618 (2000). And examples in which the Court has deferred to state legislative judgments in respect to the exercise of the police power are legion. See, e.g., Gonzales v. Oregon, 546 U. S. 243, 270 (2006) (assisted suicide); Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U. S. 702, 721 (1997) (same); Berman v. Parker, 348 U. S. 26, 32 (1954) (“We deal, in other words, with what traditionally has been known as the police power. An attempt to define its reach or trace its outer limits is fruitless …”)."
Have not states traditionally regulated marriage? Is it not then that Obergfell runs counter to this above argument?
Reply
Leave a comment