Politics & Power Quote by Ted Olson

Olson’s line is a lawyerly love letter to legitimacy: he wraps a contested social fight in the thickest available insulation - the Supreme Court and the Constitution. The phrasing does two quiet jobs at once. First, it turns “marriage” from a policy preference into a status the state must justify denying. Calling it “one of the most fundamental rights” isn’t romantic; it’s strategic. Fundamental rights trigger the judiciary’s highest suspicion of government interference, shifting the burden from “Why should you get this?” to “What gives the state the right to stop you?”

“Repeatedly held” is the tell. Olson isn’t citing a single heroic precedent; he’s invoking an accumulated institutional voice, the sense that this principle is settled law rather than a cultural fad. It’s an argument designed for judges, swing voters, and nervous allies: if you’re uneasy about social change, you can still be comfortable with continuity.

The subtext is federalism’s pressure point. By rooting marriage in constitutional rights, Olson implies that no state-level moral consensus can override individual liberty. That’s a direct rebuke to “leave it to the states” rhetoric, reframing it as permission to violate a national baseline.

Context matters because Olson - a prominent conservative legal figure - deploys this language to disarm partisan reflexes. He’s not asking America to redefine marriage out of sentiment; he’s asking it to recognize that the Court has already treated marriage as central to personhood and autonomy. The cultural move is brilliant: it turns a culture war into a rule-of-law story, where opposing him looks less like caution and more like defiance of American constitutional identity.