A right to marry?: Same-Sex Marriage and Constitutional Law

Marriage is both ubiquitous and central. All across our country, in every region, every social class, every race and ethnicity, every religion or nonreligion, people get married. For many if not most people, moreover, marriage is not a trivial matter. It is a key to the pursuit of happiness, something people aspire to—and keep aspiring to, again and again, even when their experience has been far from happy. To be told "You cannot get married" is thus to be excluded from one of the defining rituals of the American life cycle.