Roberts, C. J., dissenting
single case or other legal source providing any basis for such a constitutional right. None exists, and that is enough to foreclose their claim.
2
The majority suggests that “there are other, more instructive precedents” informing the right to marry. Ante, at 12. Although not entirely clear, this reference seems to correspond to a line of cases discussing an implied fundamental “right of privacy.” Griswold, 381 U. S., at 486. In the first of those cases, the Court invalidated a criminal law that banned the use of contraceptives. Id., at 485–486. The Court stressed the invasive nature of the ban, which threatened the intrusion of “the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms.” Id., at 485. In the Court’s view, such laws infringed the right to privacy in its most basic sense: the “right to be let alone.” Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U. S. 438, 453–454, n. 10 (1972) (internal quotation marks omitted); see Olmstead v. United States, 277 U. S. 438, 478 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting).
The Court also invoked the right to privacy in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558 (2003), which struck down a Texas statute criminalizing homosexual sodomy. Lawrence relied on the position that criminal sodomy laws, like bans on contraceptives, invaded privacy by inviting “unwarranted government intrusions” that “touc[h] upon the most private human conduct, sexual behavior… in the most private of places, the home.” Id., at 562, 567.
Neither Lawrence nor any other precedent in the privacy line of cases supports the right that petitioners assert here. Unlike criminal laws banning contraceptives and sodomy, the marriage laws at issue here involve no government intrusion. They create no crime and impose no punishment. Same-sex couples remain free to live together, to engage in intimate conduct, and to raise their families as they see fit. No one is “condemned to live in loneli-
