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Comment by seszett | Hacker News Reader

> Does anyone really believe this right was in the Constitution for 250 years, only to be discovered recently?

That seems to be the case to me. I'm not completely familiar with US history, but don't you think the right of black people to be free and equal to the other people was already written in the constitution 250 years ago, for example? Or women's suffrage. It just took a while to actually recognize it.

Homosexuality was legalized in France in 1791 according to the same set of ideals, during the same movement that gave birth to the US constitution. Slavery was abolished as well, and women's suffrage was discussed, because it was well recognized that these were all questions of equality. It isn't a stretch to think that the US constitution would also fundamentally allow homosexuality and forbid discrimination according to sexual orientation (and therefore allow gay marriage as well).

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I'm not disagreeing with your general premise that the fundamental right for equality is the basis of the constitution and therefore equal marriage is implied by it. But to your points:

"the right of black people to be free and equal to the other people" (specifically the abolishment of slavery) Is made explicit in the 13th amendment[0]

And "women's suffrage" is the 19th amendment[1]

So for both of your examples, these things are explicity added to the constitution.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...

These amendments were added via a process built into the Constitution to allow changes to be made, because the folks writing it knew they couldn't account for everything.

But furthermore, the specific wording of the constitution may actually have been intentional insofar that Jefferson may have wanted it to be clear that all people have equal rights. He obviously couldn't singlehandedly change the minds of everyone at the time, but the idea that he intentionally left the wording vague enough to include everyone is a valid idea, I think.

Making something explicit makes it clear for everyone, but you could easily argue the rights of black people and women were written into the Constitution from the start- just in less obvious ways.

That's one of the court's jobs, after all, to evaluate complex or difficult situations and laws where it is not immediately clear what the law says. It reminds me of especially tortured and opaque code. You can't see on the surface that foo=bar, but after a long and arduous process of evaluation you discover- lo and behold- foo=bar all along. Or even more difficult, you discover that foo=1 implies bar=2.

> don't you think the right of black people to be free and equal to the other people was already written in the constitution 250 years ago, for example?

No, of course it wasn't. Slavery was common and accepted when the Constitution was written, and the Constitution didn't say there was anything wrong with it until it was amended in 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment.

No. Simply because we already had equality as far as the law was concerned.

Everyone was entitled to marry someone of the opposite sex. Everyone was barred from marrying someone of the same sex. The law applied equally.

Yes, and bans on interracial marriage didn't violate equality because everyone was allowed to marry someone of their own race...

Correct.

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