Justice & Law Quote by Harry A. Blackmun

Blackmun’s sentence is doing two jobs at once: it dignifies the contested “issue” as identity-level, then turns that dignity into a demand for restraint by the powerful. The first clause (“touches the heart of what makes individuals what they are”) is a deliberate elevation move. He’s not talking about mere preference or lifestyle; he’s situating the case in the realm of personhood, where law’s interventions are at their most invasive. That framing quietly rebukes the majority’s instinct to treat the minority’s conduct as disposable or deviant. If what’s at stake is the architecture of the self, casual majoritarian disgust becomes an especially poor guide.

The second clause is the constitutional sting: “especially sensitive” reads gentle, but it’s a warning about how rights work. Rights are not social rewards for consensus behavior; they are guardrails against consensus. Blackmun’s subtext is that “upset the majority” is not an incidental political fact but the whole point of judicial vigilance. He’s rehearsing a classic countermajoritarian rationale: courts exist precisely to protect unpopular choices when democratic processes convert discomfort into coercion.

Contextually, this is the late-20th-century Supreme Court, where privacy, bodily autonomy, sexuality, and intimate association were being litigated as moral questions dressed up as legal ones. Blackmun (often linked to Roe and later dissents on sexual privacy) writes with the awareness that the Court is being asked to decide not only what government may regulate, but which kinds of people may safely exist in public without being punished for provoking the crowd. The rhetoric is calm; the stakes are not.