Education Quote by Warren E. Burger

Burger’s line is less a legal argument than a bid to smuggle theology and tradition into constitutional doctrine under the cover of inevitability. “To hold” frames the idea as an abstract temptation the Court must resist; “somehow protected” drips with dismissal, implying the right is a contrivance rather than a plausible reading of liberty. The real payload arrives with “millennia of moral teaching,” a phrase that tries to convert age into authority and consensus into constitution.

The specific intent is to narrow what counts as a “fundamental right” by yoking it to historical condemnation. Burger is effectively saying: if the past frowned, the Constitution must, too. That move depends on a sleight of hand. Moral teaching is not the same as legal tradition, and even “legal tradition” is not the same as constitutional meaning. Yet the sentence treats them as a single, unbroken chain, erasing the fact that “millennia” contains slavery, coverture, criminalized contraception, and plenty of moral certainty later recognized as cruelty.

Subtextually, the quote performs institutional protection: the Court, in Burger’s telling, isn’t denying intimacy; it’s guarding civilization’s inheritance. It also reframes the claimants as radicals asking judges to “cast aside” stability, shifting attention away from state intrusion into private life and toward the supposed recklessness of recognizing rights.

Context matters: Burger wrote in dissent in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), a decision later repudiated by Lawrence v. Texas (2003). Read now, the sentence stands as a time capsule of how easily “history” can be weaponized as a veto on minority dignity - and how judicial rhetoric can turn prejudice into prudence.