Page:Kerry v. Din.pdf/10

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
8
KERRY v. DIN

Opinion of Scalia, J.

marriage that necessarily are protected by the right to marry," and that are "presuppose[d]" by later cases estab­lishing a right to marital privacy. Brief for Respondent 16, 18. The dissent supplements the fundamental right to marriage with a fundamental right to live in the United States in order to find an affected liberty interest. Post, at 2–3 (Breyer, J., dissenting).

Attempting to abstract from these cases some liberty interest that might be implicated by Berashk’s visa denial, Din draws on even more inapposite cases. Meyer, for example, invalidated a state statute proscribing the teach­ing of foreign language to children who had not yet passed the eighth grade, reasoning that it violated the teacher’s "right thus to teach and the right of parents to engage him so to instruct their children." 262 U. S., at 400. Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U. S. 510, 534–535 (1925), extended Meyer, finding that a law requiring children to attend public schools "interferes with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of chil­dren under their control." Moore v. East Cleveland, 431 U. S. 494, 505–506 (1977), extended this interest in rais­ing children to caretakers in a child’s extended family, striking down an ordinance that limited occupancy of a single-family house to members of a nuclear family on the ground that “[d]ecisions concerning child rearing . . . long have been shared with grandparents or other relatives.” And Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479, 485 (1965), concluded that a law criminalizing the use of contracep­tives by married couples violated "penumbral rights of 'privacy and repose'" protecting “the sacred precincts of the marital bedroom”—rights which do not plausiblyextend into the offices of our consulates abroad.

Nothing in the cases Din cites establishes a free-floating and categorical liberty interest in marriage (or any other formulation Din offers) sufficient to trigger constitutional protection whenever a regulation in any way touches upon