The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and injure those whom the state, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that the federal law under discussion unjustly harms individuals that marriage laws aim to protect.
In this quote, Anthony Kennedy argues that the federal statute in question is invalid because it does not serve a legitimate purpose that justifies its negative impact on certain individuals. He points out that the law fails to uphold the dignity and personhood that the state's marriage laws were intended to safeguard, highlighting a fundamental issue of equality and respect for all individuals.
In practice
In a discussion about marriage equality in a legal forum.
First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.
We must never lose sight of the fact that the law has a moral foundation, and we must never fail to ask ourselves not only what the law is, but what the law should be.
At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.
The lessons of the First Amendment are as urgent in the modern world as the 18th Century when it was written. One timeless lesson is that if citizens are subjected to state-sponsored religious exercises, the State disavows its own duty to guard and respect that sphere of inviolable conscience and belief which is the mark of a free people.
Sometimes you don't know if you're Caesar about to cross the Rubicon or Captain Queeg cutting your own tow line.
The hardest problems of all in law enforcement are those involving a conflict of law and local customs. History has recorded many occasions when the moral sense of a nation produced judicial decisions, such as the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which required difficult local adjustments.
The language of the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws did not change between 1896 and 1954, and it would be very hard to say that the obvious facts on which 'Plessy' was based had changed.
The constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it.
I will not say with Lord Hale, that "The Law will admit of no rival" . . . but I will say that it is a jealous mistress, and requires a long and constant courtship. It is not to be won by trifling favors, but by lavish homage.
A person's mere propinquity to others independently suspected of criminal activity does not give rise to probable cause to search that person.
Statutes authorizing unreasonable searches were the core concern of the framers of the 4th Amendment.
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