The only effort the chief justice makes to distinguish the Loving case from the same-sex marriage case is that it did not alter “the core structure of marriage as the union between a man and a woman.” But the states that forbade miscegenation considered the prohibition an important part of the core structure of marriage. For they thought part of the core was that marriage be uniracial—that whites must just marry whites and blacks just marry blacks—just as Orthodox Jews believe that the core structure of (their) marriage culture is both spouses subscribe to Orthodox Judaism.

The chief justice worries that the majority opinion has mounted “assaults on the character of fairminded people” who oppose same-sex marriage, by remarking that they impose “ ‘[d]ignitary wounds’ upon their gay and lesbian neighbors.” But of course they do, even if innocently, because a married couple doesn’t appreciate being told that their marriage, though legal, is sinful. That isn’t to say that people are forbidden to oppose same-sex marriage; it is merely to remark on one of the costs of that opposition and one of the reasons to doubt that it should be permitted to express itself in a law forbidding such marriage.

Related to the preceding point, the chief justice’s dissent is heartless. There is of course a long history of persecution of gay people, a history punctuated by such names as Oscar Wilde, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Alan Turing. Until quite recently, many American gays and lesbians took great pains to conceal their homosexuality in order to avoid discrimination. They value marriage just as straight people do. They want their adopted children to have the psychological and financial advantages of legitimacy. They are hurt by the discrimination that the dissenting justices condone. Prohibiting gay marriage is discrimination.