Abstract The legitimacy of recent judgments in the Supreme Court, lower federal courts and State courts which have extended the scope of the Due Process and/or Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment has been a fiercely contested controversy in legal and political circles in the USA. The controversy has been especially sharp in relation to the question of same sex marriage, and specifically whether it is within State competence to refuse to allow same sex couples to marry under State law. This paper explores that legitimation controversy through a multi-contextual analysis of the Supreme Court’s starkly divided judgment in Obergefell v Hodges (2015), in which a bare majority of the Court concluded that a State ban on same sex marriage was incompatible with the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This paper critiques both the majority and dissenting opinions, and suggests that while one might applaud the substantive conclusion the Court has reached, the reasoning offered by the majority suffers from several obvious weaknesses both in narrow doctrinal terms and from the broader perspective of safeguarding the Court from well-founded criticism that it is overstepping the bounds of its legitimate constitutional role.

中文翻译：

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第十四修正案规定的自由，平等和结婚权

摘要最高法院，联邦下级法院和州法院最近判决的合法性扩大了“正当程序”和/或“第十四条修正案”中的“平等保护”条款的范围，在美国法律界和政治界引起了激烈的争论。关于同性婚姻的问题，尤其是根据州法律拒绝允许同性伴侣结婚是否属于国家职权范围，争议尤其尖锐。本文通过对最高法院在Obergefell诉Hodges（2015）一案中对最高法院的严厉分歧的判决进行多上下文分析来探讨这种合法性争议，在该判决中，绝大多数法院认为国家禁止同性婚姻与正当程序不符。第十四修正案的条款。