Thomas, J., dissenting
recognition and benefits associated with marriage.
In a concession to petitioners’ misconception of liberty, the majority characterizes petitioners’ suit as a quest to “find… liberty by marrying someone of the same sex and having their marriages deemed lawful on the same terms and conditions as marriages between persons of the opposite sex.” Ante, at 2. But “liberty” is not lost, nor can it be found in the way petitioners seek. As a philosophical matter, liberty is only freedom from governmental action, not an entitlement to governmental benefits. And as a constitutional matter, it is likely even narrower than that, encompassing only freedom from physical restraint and imprisonment. The majority’s “better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define… liberty,” ante, at 19,–better informed, we must assume, than that of the people who ratified the Fourteenth Amendment–runs headlong into the reality that our Constitution is a “collection of ‘Thou shalt nots,’ ” Reid v. Covert, 354 U. S. 1, 9 (1957) (plurality opinion), not “Thou shalt provides.”
III
The majority’s inversion of the original meaning of liberty will likely cause collateral damage to other aspects of our constitutional order that protect liberty.
A
The majority apparently disregards the political process as a protection for liberty. Although men, in forming a civil society, “give up all the power necessary to the ends for which they unite into society, to the majority of the community,” Locke §99, at 49, they reserve the authority to exercise natural liberty within the bounds of laws established by that society, id., §22, at 13; see also Hey §§52, 54, at 30–32. To protect that liberty from arbitrary interference, they establish a process by which that society can
