From the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decision upholding state same-sex marriage bans in Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and Michigan, entered November 6, 2014:
Yes, the Fourteenth Amendment is old; the people ratified it in 1868. And yes, it is generally worded: it says, "[N]or 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." Nobody in this case, however, argues that the people who adopted the Fourteenth Amendment understood it to require the States to change the definition of marriage.
Tradition reinforces the point. Only months ago, the Supreme Court confirmed the significance of long-accepted usage in constitutional interpretation...Applied here, this approach permits today's marriage laws to stand until the democratic processes say they should stand no more. From the founding of the Republic to 2003, every State defined marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman, meaning that the Fourteenth Amendment permits, though it does not require, States to define marriage that way.
The above passage appears in a subsection titled "Original meaning," discussing the Court's view of what "marriage" means traditionally in the United States. Other cases have similarly weighed on the "original meanings" of both the Fourteenth Amendment and the institution of civil marriage.
State v. Jackson, 80 Mo. 175, 176, 178-179 (Mo. 1883):
It may interfere with the taste of negroes who want to marry whites, or whites who wish to intermarry with negroes, but the State has the same right to regulate marriages in this respect that it has to forbid the intermarriage of cousins and other blood relations. If the State desires to preserve the purity of the African blood by prohibiting intermarriages between whites and blacks, we know of no power on earth to prevent such legislation. It is a matter of purely domestic concern. The 14th amendment to the Constitution of the United States, to which, by some, magical power is ascribed, has no such scope as seems to have been accorded to it by the circuit court.
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Marriage acts similar to the one under consideration were in force in most of the slave-holding states prior to the adoption of the 14th amendment, and their validity was never questioned, no one supposing that there was, prior to that amendment, any provision of the federal constitution with which they were in conflict, and it is only by ascribing to that amendment a force and scope expressly denied it by the Supreme Court of the United States that any ground exists for questioning their validity now. Nor is it one of the natural rights of man to marry whom he may choose. . .The right to regulate marriage, the age at which persons may enter into that relation, the manner in which the rites may be celebrated, and the persons between whom it may be contracted, has been assumed and exercised by every civilized and Christian nation; and the condition of a community, moral, mental and physical, which would tolerate indiscriminate intermarriage for several generations, would demonstrate the wisdom of laws which regulate marriage and forbid the intermarriage of those nearly related in blood. It is stated as a well authenticated fact that if the issue of a black man and a white woman, and a white man and a black woman, intermarry, they cannot possibly have any progeny, and such a fact sufficiently justifies those laws which forbid the intermarriage of blacks and whites, laying out of view other sufficient grounds for such enactments.
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 544, 545, 550 (1896):
The object of the [Fourteenth] [A]mendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but, in the nature of things, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation in places where they are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power. The most common instance of this is connected with the establishment of separate schools for white and colored children, which has been held to be a valid exercise of the legislative power even by courts of States where the political rights of the colored race have been longest and most earnestly enforced.
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Laws forbidding the intermarriage of the two races may be said in a technical sense to interfere with the freedom of contract, and yet have been universally recognized as within the police power of the State.
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So far, then, as a conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment is concerned, the case reduces itself to the question whether [a state law] is a reasonable regulation, and, with respect to this, there must necessarily be a large discretion on the part of the legislature. In determining the question of reasonableness, it is at liberty to act with reference to the established usages, customs, and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort and the preservation of the public peace and good order. Gauged by this standard, we cannot say that a law which authorizes or even requires the separation of the two races in public conveyances is unreasonable, or more obnoxious to the Fourteenth Amendment than the acts of Congress requiring separate schools for colored children in the District of Columbia, the constitutionality of which does not seem to have been questioned, or the corresponding acts of state legislatures.
Daviess County Board of Education, et al. v. Johnson, 179 Ky. 34, 39 (Ky Ct. App. 1918):
Under our Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution, it is not necessary that the rights or privileges of the two races shall be identical, but only that they shall be equal.
Harris v. City of Louisville, Buchanan v. Warley, 165 Ky. 559, 570 (Ky. 1915):
The enforced separation of the races alone is not a discrimination or denial of the constitutional guaranty; and if such separation should result in the members of the colored race being restricted to residence in the less desirable portions of the city, they may render those portions more desirable through their own efforts, as the white race has done. Economic equality is not created by statutory declaration nor guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Stevens v. United States, 146 F.2d 120, 123 (10th Cir. 1944):
Marriage is a consentient covenant. It is a contract in the sense that it is entered into by agreement of the parties. But it is more than a civil contract between them, subject to their will and pleasure in respect of effects, continuance, or dissolution. It is a domestic relation having to do with the morals and civilization of a people. It is an essential institution in every well organized society. It affects in a vital manner public welfare, and its control and regulation is a matter of domestic concern within each state. A state has power to prescribe by law the age at which persons may enter into marriage, the procedure essential to constitute a valid marriage, the duties and obligations which it creates, and its effects upon the property rights of both parties. And within the range of permissible adoption of policies deemed to be promotive of the welfare of society as well as the individual members thereof, a state is empowered to forbid marriages between persons of African descent and persons of other races or descents. Such a statute does not contravene the Fourteenth Amendment.
Naim v. Naim, 197 Va. 80, 86, 89-90 (Va. 1955):
From the Slaughter-House Cases, to Brown v. Board of Education, and Bolling v. Sharpe, the Supreme Court has made no decision at variance with the holding in the Stevens case. It has on numerous occasions invoked the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment to invalidate State legislation and decision with respect to political and civil rights, but it has not denied to the States the right to deal with their social and domestic problems and to legislate in regard to the marriage relation. On the contrary, it has been at pains to exclude that relation from the effects of its holdings.
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We are unable to read in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, or in any other provision of that great document, any words or any intendment which prohibit the State from enacting legislation to preserve the racial integrity of its citizens, or which denies the power of the State to regulate the marriage relation so that it shall not have a mongrel breed of citizens. We find there no requirement that the State shall not legislate to prevent the obliteration of racial pride, but must permit the corruption of blood even though it weaken or destroy the quality of its citizenship. Both sacred and secular history teach that nations and races have better advanced in human progress when they cultivated their own distinctive characteristics and culture and developed their own peculiar genius.
Regulation of the marriage relation is, we think, distinctly one of the rights guaranteed to the States and safeguarded by that bastion of States' rights, somewhat battered perhaps but still a sturdy fortress in our fundamental law, the tenth section of the Bill of Rights, which declares: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."