Love Quote by Harry A. Blackmun

Blackmun doesn’t dress this up as radical; he frames it as almost embarrassingly basic. By calling intimate relationships in one’s home the “heart” of constitutional privacy, he’s not merely defending a lifestyle choice. He’s staking out a hierarchy of liberties: if the Constitution protects anything from majoritarian meddling, it’s the private sphere where adults form bonds, desire, and family outside public supervision.

The phrasing is strategic. “Conduct” sounds clinical, nearly procedural, as if to strip the topic of moral panic. “Intimate relationships” is capacious on purpose, a phrase that can shelter more than one controversial fact pattern without naming them. And “in the intimacy of his or her own home” doubles down on location as the moral argument: the state’s authority thins out at the doorstep. Blackmun is inviting the reader to feel how intrusive the alternative would be - government policing bedrooms, not just behavior.

Context matters: Blackmun’s privacy jurisprudence sits in the long shadow of Griswold v. Connecticut and the Court’s effort to describe privacy without an explicit constitutional clause. The subtext is a rebuttal to critics who saw privacy as judicial invention. He’s saying: even if you dislike the doctrine’s architecture, the lived stakes are obvious. Constitutional liberty can’t mean much if it stops precisely where people are most vulnerable and most themselves.

There’s also a forward-looking edge. By rooting privacy in intimate association, Blackmun quietly equips future courts to defend unpopular relationships before the culture is ready, treating dignity not as a reward for conformity but as a baseline.