Justice & Law Quote by Harry A. Blackmun

Blackmun’s line is a scalpel disguised as a simple diagnosis: the Court isn’t merely misunderstanding a case, it’s refusing to “recognize” an interest so basic it should never have needed naming. “Really” signals dissent’s familiar move - pulling back the curtain on the majority’s stated logic to expose what’s being smuggled in underneath. And what’s underneath is not a technical dispute about doctrine, but a clash over whose autonomy counts.

The phrase “fundamental interest” is doing heavy constitutional work. It borrows the gravity of substantive due process without announcing it outright, inviting the reader to treat intimate life as a liberty interest on par with speech or religion. Blackmun’s “all individuals” is equally tactical: he’s preempting the Court’s habit of treating privacy as a special privilege for the respectable, the married, the conventional. By casting the stake as universal, he frames exclusion as a moral failure, not a narrow legal call.

“Controlling the nature of their intimate associations” is careful, almost clinical language for what American law often prefers to euphemize: sex, partnership, family formation, and the right to choose them without state punishment or paternalistic supervision. It’s also a warning about precedent. If the Court won’t acknowledge this interest at the level of principle, it leaves “intimate associations” vulnerable to regulation whenever majorities feel anxious, offended, or righteous.

Context matters: Blackmun, shaped by the privacy debates of the late 20th century, is writing in an era when the Court repeatedly had to decide whether constitutional liberty protects unpopular intimacy. The subtext is blunt: this isn’t neutrality; it’s the state picking winners in the most personal arena of human life.