(04-09-2016 08:49 PM)JOwl Wrote:  

(04-09-2016 01:22 AM)Jonathan Sadow Wrote:  Of course, the issue was never "feel[ing] the need to stop someone else from getting one", but rather the rationale for the role of government in regulating marriage. The Obergfell decision basically has destroyed any such rationale.

So now that the rationale has been "destroyed", what's the way forward? Do conservatives push bills that take marriage out of the government's purview entirely?

Doesn't Obergfell implicitly REQUIRE government to authorize marriage? I seem to recall that one premise of the opinion by Chief Justice Roberts was that marriage is so fundamental to human nature (or something like that) that government HAS to authorize it -- and therefore cannot discriminate in doing so.

A commentator at the time opined that if Justice Ginsburg had written the opinion, she probably would have reached the same result ("government can't discriminate") purely on equal protection grounds, without going into the fundamentality (if you will) of marriage.

The reason I'm recalling it this way is that I thought it was a bit ironic that Roberts, the alleged conservative, seemed to be giving constitutional status to a positive right (a "right to marry") that the Constitution never mentions, while one of the alleged arch-liberals would have been more of a strict textualist on the 14th Amendment.

Anyway, if the above description is correct, it would be a rare case of turning government licensing into a constitutional mandate: the government may not have to license drivers, doctors, cosmetologists or anything else, but it MUST license marriages.