Re: Texas AG Says Workers Can Refuse Marriage Licenses to Gays
Recognizing equal rights for benefits and privileges accorded by the govt is 'SCOTUS gone rogue?' Damn!
Equal protection did not play any significant role in Justice Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell. He wrote some gobbledygook about it which, as Chief Justice Roberts noted in his dissent, "is, quite frankly, difficult to follow." Roberts continued: "The majority goes on to assert in conclusory fashion that the Equal Protection Clause provides an alternative basis for its holding. Yet the majority fails to provide even a single sentence explaining how the Equal Protection Clause supplies independent weight for its position, nor does it attempt to justify its gratuitous violation of the canon against unnecessarily resolving constitutional questions."
Obergell, like Roe v. Wade, is entirely a substantive due process decision. The Chief Justice also recalled that the Court first used the doctrine of substantive due process in the notorious decision that made the Civil War inevitable, Dred Scott v. Sandford:
"The need for restraint in administering the strong medicine of substantive due process is a lesson this Court has learned the hard way. The Court first applied substantive due process to strike down a statute in Dred Scott v. Sandford. There the Court invalidated the Missouri Compromise on the ground that legislation restricting the institution of slavery violated the implied rights of slaveholders. The Court relied on its own conception of liberty and property in doing so. It asserted that 'an act of Congress which deprives a citizen of the United States of his liberty or property, merely because he came himself or brought his property into a particular Territory of the United States . . . could hardly be dignified with the name of due process of law.' In a dissent that has outlasted the majority opinion, Justice Curtis explained that
when the 'fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws [are] abandoned, and the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control' the Constitution’s meaning, 'we have no longer a Constitution; we are under the government of individual men, who for the time being have power to declare what the Constitution is, according to their own views of what it ought to mean.'" (emphasis added)
For reasons that Justice Thomas explained in great detail in his dissent, the notion that the Due Process Clause of either the Fifth or Fourteenth Amendment guarantees privileges that would not exist but for government has no support whatever in the history of the concept of due process, when it is analyzed from its roots in Magna Charta to modern times:
Even if the doctrine of substantive due process were somehow defensible—it is not—petitioners still would not have a claim. To invoke the protection of the Due Process Clause at all—whether under a theory of 'substantive' or 'procedural' due process—a party must first identify a deprivation of 'life, liberty, or property. The majority claims these state laws deprive petitioners of 'liberty,' but the concept of 'liberty' it conjures up bears no resemblance to any plausible meaning of that word as it is used in the Due Process Clauses . . .
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In enacting the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, the Framers similarly chose to employ the 'life, liberty, or property' formulation, though they otherwise deviated substantially from the States’ use of Magna Carta’s language in the Clause. When read in light of the history of that formulation, it is hard to see how the 'liberty' protected by the Clause could be interpreted to include anything broader than freedom from physical restraint . . .
If the Fifth Amendment uses 'liberty' in this narrow sense, then the Fourteenth Amendment likely does as well. Indeed, this Court has previously commented, 'The conclusion is . . . irresistible, that when the same phrase was employed in the Fourteenth Amendment [as was used in the Fifth Amendment], it was used in the same sense and with no greater extent.' And this Court’s earliest Fourteenth Amendment decisions appear to interpret the Clause as using 'liberty' to mean freedom from physical restraint . . . That the Court appears to have lost its way in more recent years does not justify deviating from the original meaning of the Clauses.
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Even assuming that the 'liberty' in those Clauses encompasses something more than freedom from physical restraint, it would not include the types of rights claimed by the majority. In the American legal tradition, liberty has long been understood as individual freedom
from governmental action, not as a right
to a particular governmental entitlement.