The constitutional duty to protect marriage and family is a rather recent task for public authorities. While these particularly personal forms of social interaction have always been of political interest to some extent, the attempt to provide them with basic rights protection against and by the state is a development from the last 100 years. Nowadays, such obligations are anchored not only in the constitutions or in the constitutional practice of virtually all European nation states, but also within the European fundamental rights protection systems as well as on the global level of public international law. Apart from this success story, however, the social phenomena that are being addressed as well as their context have changed considerably in European societies. The historically controversial questions of why and how marriage and family are to be protected by basic rights, therefore have still not been solved completely. This article addresses the history of this young fundamental right as well as different approaches to its interpretation in using the example of the protection clause of the German Basic Law.

保护婚姻和家庭的宪法义务是公共当局最近才承担的任务。虽然这些特别个人化的社会互动形式在某种程度上一直具有政治利益，但为它们提供针对国家和由国家提供基本权利保护的尝试是过去 100 年来的发展。如今，此类义务不仅植根于几乎所有欧洲民族国家的宪法或宪法实践中，而且植根于欧洲基本权利保护体系以及全球层面的国际公法。然而，除了这个成功的故事之外，欧洲社会正在解决的社会现象及其背景也发生了很大的变化。因此，婚姻和家庭为何以及如何受到基本权利保护这一历史上颇有争议的问题至今仍未得到彻底解决。本文以德国基本法保护条款为例，探讨这项年轻的基本权利的历史，以及对其解释的不同方法。