Marriage is not a right.

Marriage is when the state grants you a consensual and contractual law-recognized relationship.   It's controlled and has limitations.   It is not a right. 

There is no promised, inherent or  guaranteed right to anyone that the state or other institution of authority will either allow them to get married, be married or otherwise enter into some other legal contractual status, marriage-related or not.    Marriage is not guaranteed in the US Constitution in either a legal, social, moral or religious context.   It's not directly anything the 14th Amendment (specifically Section 1) currently covers.   However it might turn out one day,  that's a day in the future that is not today.      Arguments to the contrary, this is not medieval Europe where two parties taking each other as wife and husband become a married couple under common law.   

However, one thing is clear about today.   Right or wrong, advanced or backwards, fair or unfair, normal or abnormal.   It is Wife and Husband.  That is,  5/6ths of the world considers marriage to be between the two, wife in the sense of adult human female and husband in the sense of adult human male.




One definition of  marriage is  "being united to a person of the opposite sex as husband or wife in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law".   It is a social matter, and in most places in the world, it is between one single rational unrelated adult male human and one single rational unrelated adult female human.   Sound mind, sound body, not under the influence of mind-altering substances or under coercion.    With a license approved by the state allowing  you to marry.  This is fairly universal enough to say it's the rule rather than the exception.

In most states of the US, it is this way also. You can't marry your relatives, children or the insane.  That it's "a man and a woman" is clear too.    By majority, states have added a prohibition to same-sex marriage by statue (12) or to their own constitutions (30) by vote of the public; and in states where same-sex marriage is legal it has been accomplished not by the voters but by the legislators.   Legislators using in many cases narrowly defined court cases of limited scope to justify their actions.   There are also places where it's not legal but is recognized from other states and certain tribes that have legalized it.      The point though is that it's hardly universal, but in fact it is quite the opposite.    That should tell us enough about "rights" just there.

Note though, thoughts and arguments to the contrary,  that none of this really has much of anything to do at all with the sexual orientation of the parties.  They being homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, monosexual, multisexual, antisexual or otherwise, it's all immaterial.    The only reason to bring it up is as a political issue to make a point, to fight for social change, to right perceived injustices.  (Which is in many ways a worthy endeavor, but beyond our scope.)    Even a marriage between a male and a female is unconcerned to a large part about their sexual orientation or sexual preference, ignoring various annulment or divorce reasoning revolving around such.    In the end, none of that distraction matters, in the sense of mixing too many subjects into one to confuse things.   

Commonly, the idea is that restricting marriage based upon the biological sex of the participants is discrimination. Perhaps it is.   If it is discrimination any more than restricting age or kinship or numbers of spouses, that is another question.   Whatever else though, the thought of some is that there's some human right to marry, or to be legally recognized as legitimate somehow as being involved.  A bit of  that marriage belongs in the realm of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.    That it's a universal right to be able to marry somebody you love.    (Which of course for a large part of history, love had nothing much to do with marriage, at least not in a romantic sense.  And for those that are or have been married, please hold in your any laughs you may have about pursuing happiness and liberty when it comes to wedded bliss.)

Saying that marriage is not a right or that society and law establishes the "one man one woman" thing is just how it is.   This is not to say that  there's anything wrong with two people of the same biological sex wanting to marry or being married.   Quite the contrary, who really cares, what does it really matter, why is it important.    It's not, but it is.   It's a social matter, so what society as a whole thinks of it is just how it is.   It's not immutable and eternal though.     Laws change, ideas change, things change.    For example, the age of consent in the 1880s versus the 1920s versus today.  see     More directly, Like in the past where laws that prohibited miscegenation that were eventually overturned by a combination of social changes and legal holdings.  However, the fact that states were able to prohibit such at one point for a long period of legal and social time should be illustration enough there's no right to marry, but rather a somewhat flexible system that allows some to marry and disallows others to do so.   A system that can and does change over time, but not a right that is absolute.   Equating age to skin color to biological sex to sexual orientation to gender roles to religion though, well let's just drop that idea so as to not overly complicate things as if we were having a political debate.


The ability to participate in the privilege of getting married, or to have the state grant you a consensual and contractual law-recognized relationship, or to get a marriage license and the proper documentation....   That all rests upon the state in which you live.   If you don't like the laws in your state, you are able to move to another state whose laws you prefer.     Marriage is controlled per state.   Take Colorado.   Say you are a 20 year-old female.  You can marry most any 18 year-old or older male, but the choice is not unlimited.  There are restrictions.  (We say 18, but with the consent of both parents you could marry a 16 year-old or 17 year-old male, and with the consent of both parents and a court order granting judicial approval you could marry a 15 year-old or younger male.)   No blood test is required, there's no waiting period, neither of you has to be a Colorado resident.   You don't have to love each other, like each other, plan to have children or even live together.  One or both or neither of you can be straight and un-kinky or otherwise.   (Your choice of spouse could be a satanic homosexual transvestite cross-dressing foot-fetishist necrophiliac pederast.)     You can be of mixed race, mixed religion, mixed culture or both from exactly the same socio-economic-political-ethnic group.      You only have to have a license, which requires a limited amount of time and documentation from both parties and no external permission (except in cases of those 17 or younger as the spouse).     

Other than that?   You can't marry another person or persons if you're already married, that is, you can't be married to more than one person at a time. You can't marry  (unless less than half blood) your brother or your nephew.   You can't marry any ancestor or descendant (parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren, etc).   Obviously, and this gets really silly, you can't marry your horse, your alarm clock,  your rose bush, a corpse, invisible people, ghosts, vampires or deities.   (Which is in no way saying that somebody of the same biological sex and a brother and a ghost or a horse are the same thing.)

We've been though this all before in a slightly different manner.    But the fact is that although our fictitional 20 year-old woman may really really really love her mother, they can't get married in Delaware.  It doesn't matter about anything else, be it sexual orientation or otherwise.       Not just because they're ancestor and descendant, not just because they're both female, not just because both the law and society say no.    But also because marriage is not a right.



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First Amendment  
In the US, Congress can't pass laws that:
Respects the establishment of a religion.
Prohibits the free exercise of a religion.
Abridges the freedom of speech.
Abridges the freedom of the press.
Abridges the right of the people to peaceably assemble.
Abridges the right of the people to petition the government for a redress of grievances.


Fourteenth Amendment Section 1
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

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Wikipedia:    Marriage      Marriage Law     Institution    Civil and Political Rights