Privacy Rights Under the Constitution: Procreation, Child Rearing, Contraception, Marriage, and Sexual Activityfrom the US Congressional Research Service, September 2022
"Marriage
Other cases have established a fundamental right to marry. In 1967, the Court first recognized the
fundamental right to marry as a liberty interest protected under the Due Process Clause. In Loving v.
Virginia, the Court declared unconstitutional a Virginia statute that prohibited interracial marriage. Chief
Justice Warren, writing for a unanimous court, first held that the state anti-miscegenation law was an
equal protection violation based on an impermissible racial classification. The Loving court then also
recognized a right to marry as a fundamental right protected under substantive due process. The Court has
reaffirmed the right to marry on several occasions. In 2015, the Court held in Obergefell v. Hodges that
same-sex couples can exercise the fundamental right to marry in all states, and that states must recognize
marriages validly performed out-of-state. The Court reasoned that state laws limiting marriage to
opposite-sex couples excluded a category of persons from exercising the fundamental right to marry
under substantive due process. The majority also discussed in the substantive due process analysis that
such laws deny equal protection to individuals because of their sexual orientation"