In many states you can adopt a 40 year old, if he is willing.

I didn’t say you couldn’t do it in many states, I said I couldn’t. And I was wrong since it is allowed in my state, but you had no way of knowing that 🙂

But my point, which was “‘it isn’t hurting anyone’ doesn’t mean I automatically get to do something”, stands, because states have the right to restrict adoption to minors, and some do, and some allow adult adoption but limit its effects. You have a right to have children, but not necessarily the children that you want, even if all parties are willing. In the same way, I believe you have a right to marry, but not necessarily the spouse that you want, even if all parties are willing.

First off, get your facts straight. In many states you can adopt a 40 year old, if he is willing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_adoption

AFAIK, this doesn’t accomplish anything except make the adoptee (one of) your default heir(s), and make sex or marriage with him or her illegal. It would seem to be simpler to just write a will (except where the law requires some portion of your estate go to your children), but adoption might avoid some estate taxes.

Two examples outside the US:

1. In Japan, it is a common way of transferring ownership of a family business, when the owner is childless or his heirs are not willing and able to take over management.

2. In the Roman Empire, most emperors chose their successor through adoption rather than passing the throne down to their children. They usually adopted an adult, to ensure that if the emperor died prematurely, the heir was not a child who could not defend the throne.

I see removing all marriage licenses as a generally good thing, though possibly done for the wrong reasons.
I suppose it does validate the slippery slope that some feared.

Scalia’s safeguard against abuse is heightened public scrutiny. But what about a case where the conflict of interest is real and serious? Perhaps a USSC justice should be allowed to have an appeals judge on tap to vote in his place ( but not to draft opinions).

Ann Althouse also has some thoughts on the flimsiness of the Ginsburg-should-recuse demands (which echo similarly flimsy demands from some on the Left that conservative Justices recuse from various cases because, e.g., Justice Thomas’s wife has worked for conservative groups): http://althouse.blogspot.com/2015/04/nary-no-vote-in-louisiana-house-on.html

None of those marriages were in states that were at issue in this case. They were perfectly ordinary weddings that could have been performed by anybody authorized by the state to solemnize marriages. By your logic, should the justices avoid ATMs for several months if a case involving banking comes up? Should they refuse to pay their income taxes if a tax case is granted? Should they be permitted to be near firearms when a 2nd Amendment case is on the calendar?

Bob

If the Supreme Court continues to rule on cases according to their own policy preferences rather than the text of the relevant laws and Constitution then we end up with an unpredictable legal climate that benefits nobody. What’s the point of having legislatures if the courts can ignore the text of the laws they pass?

We are supposed to have a Federal Government of limited & defined powers. Marriage (or the definition thereof) is not a part of any of the defined powers and thus according to the 10th Amendment is reserved to the States or to the People.

States have handled marriage for the last 225 years. They should have been left to do so.

Doing so would confer significant benefits on them while causing not one iota of harm to anyone else.

Untrue. If I own a company and have benefits, my expenses just went up. If the government is going to give more tax breaks, either everyone else’s taxes go up or the debt goes up. That’s not even getting into the religious freedom stuff, which is actually important.

And “it isn’t hurting anyone” doesn’t mean I automatically get to do something. If I wanted to adopt a 40 year old, I wouldn’t be able to, because that’s not what adoption is, even though it would be blatant “age discrimination” and “wouldn’t hurt anyone” and might give us “significant benefits”.

People would like to be treated equally.

A gay man could have married almost exactly the same set of people I could have married. The difference only being that he wanted to marry someone not in that set.

What then is the point of the 14th Amendment if not to address precisely that kind of situation?

The 14th amendment was put in place during a time when certain people were prohibited by law from, say, learning to read. The framers of the 14th would never have passed it if they had known it would be used for this.