Reply #27: Wrong. This is absolutely, 100% false.

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'there's no constitutional right to ANY marriage"

This is wrong. There absolutely is a recognized Constitutional right to marry the person of one's choice. It's an aspect of substantive due process which was recognized most famously by the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia.

There are many well established Constitutional rights that don't appear explicitly in the Constitution but that flow from its general liberty guarantees. Substantive due process includes not only the right to marry, but also the right to rear one's children the way one sees fit, the right to travel, the right to privacy, etc. Did you know that the right to vote isn't explicitly enumerated in the Constitution? Would you say the right to vote isn't Constitutionally guaranteed? Of course not. It, too, is protected by due process.

In fact, the only people who have tried to limit the rights guaranteed by the Constitution to those written on the page are so-called "strict constructionists," a.k.a., conservatives, who naturally wish to limit individual rights of the common folk.

However, this is not the way our Constitution works or is currently applied. The rights you are guaranteed by the Constitution don't end at the four corners of the page. Among these rights is the substantive due process right to marry a person of one's choosing, which, as stated, is settled law as of the Loving decision.

Anyone who had passed Constitutional law would know that there is in fact a right to marry. Since Elena Kagan is a bit more advanced in her legal career, this couldn't be what she meant when she answered that there was no Constitutional right to gay marriage; she wasn't sliding by on a "lawyerly" technicality, as you like to suppose she was. In fact, it's more likely she knows there has been an ongoing debate about whether the right to marry a person of one's choosing also applies to those seeking to marry someone of the same gender.

The fact she answered this way is troubling because, if it was meant prospectively, it seems likely she would side with conservatives and limit the right to mixed-gender couples.