A random thought upon beginning a re-reading of Obergefell, which is really just another way of putting a well-known position in a well-known dispute:

The constitutional originalist strives to uphold the terms of a bargain among a people utterly alien to him, people whose culture and reasons he surely and inevitably fails fully to understand much less feel and intuit. He prefers adherence to this bargain rather than that struck by his more recent predecessors: the bargain concerning what to do with all the bargains that came before. And here we all are, giving shape to the past's now-formless physics and calling them intentions. We could indeed adopt a model of law that pretends to reanimate minds and eschews a more direct aim at living together acceptably. It would instead take a purposefully indirect route toward that goal, fearful that anything else would make kings of those at whose feet decisions fall. But that way too makes a king, a king of the one who raises an authority partly from the dead but entirely from opinionated debris and puppets the zombie's mouth.