Obergefell V. Hodges And The Geographic Contingency Of Personhood

Any right whose obligations are enforced arbitrarily, contingent on any condition against any person, fractures the personhood of the individual, revealing that the right itself is illegitimate.

Obligations precede rights. In the case of free speech, courts have an obligation to uphold this right by prosecuting violations of this unalienable right. For example, if an activist publishes a radical text and faces undue arrest, they depend on courts to protect their right to free speech. In the realm of a corrupted judicial branch where political arrests are not examined for violations of the right to free speech, the activist finds themselves having a right in theory but not in practice. Rights are only truly real to the extent that they must have their corresponding obligations fulfilled, otherwise they are nothing but aspirational fiction.

This raises an important question: if obligations precede rights, then who is responsible for fulfilling those obligations? All obligations may only be fulfilled by another person. It is not specifically the judicial system that fulfills its obligation to uphold free speech, but the judge who adjudicates the case. Law is the codified mechanism to align humans within government systems to fulfill their obligations to uphold individual rights.

On November 7th, 2025, the United States Supreme Court will consider hearing Kim Davis' challenge to same-sex marriage. Obergefell V. Hodges in 2015 established that "the Fourteenth Amendment requires a State to license a marriage between two people of the same sex and to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-State." Put simply, all same-sex couples, in any state whatsoever, have a right to a licensed marriage and recognition of any out-of-state licensed marriage. If Obergefell is overturned, this federal protection disappears, returning the question to individual states.

All obligations, and thus all rights, can be thought of as the simple result of a singular, ultimate obligation: to respect the humanity of the other. The physical needs of a man's humanity are apparent: he has a right to shelter; he has a right to food and water; he has a right to safety. But the mental needs of a man's humanity, their capability to be a full and integrated person, are seldom discussed. Among a man's mental needs is this: the capacity to form intimate bonds, to be recognized in one's love, to sow roots and build a family, to be recognized in his sharing of life with his beloved. Marriage itself is the recognition of this fundamental human need.

If Obergefell is overturned and the right to marriage depends on which state one lives in, personhood itself becomes contingent on geography. A gay man in Oregon can marry; the same man in Texas cannot. His fundamental humanity, his human need for recognized love, roots, and family, is determined not by his being but his geography. That is to say gay rights become less than straight rights, that a gay man's humanity is inherently lesser in value than if he were heterosexual.

As noted in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

If all men are created equal and they contain within them a set of natural rights by virtue of their humanity, like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and those rights are upheld by respecting the humanity of the other, any partially upheld unalienable right is inherently illegitimate. A right to marriage only for straight people but not gay people is equivalent to codified apartheid on the basis of sexuality. If one must cross state lines just to be a full person, then the United States itself ceases to be a unified nation of equal persons; it becomes a patchwork of territories where personhood is contingent on geography. This is the structural fragmentation of personhood itself.