The Freedom to Build a Life of One’s Own
What This Value Means
Privacy and love encompass the freedom to form intimate relationships, choose one’s partner, and build a family life without government interference. This includes the right to marry the person you choose, to make private decisions about your relationships, and to live according to your own values so long as you are not harming others. These freedoms recognize that personal autonomy extends to the most intimate corners of life — whom you love, whom you commit to, and how you form a family. They affirm that dignity and liberty require space for private decision-making beyond the reach of the state.
Why It Matters
The ability to choose one’s partner is fundamental to a free society. When government dictates the boundaries of personal relationships, it denies individuals their autonomy, reduces families to political constructs, and erodes the foundations of equality. Privacy in intimate life protects people from discrimination, coercion, and surveillance. It ensures that couples — interracial, same-sex, blended, adopted, or otherwise — can form families that reflect their own identities and aspirations. Protecting privacy and love strengthens liberty, fosters social stability, and honors the basic human need for connection.
Where This Value Comes From
The principles of privacy and intimate freedom are grounded in the Constitution and have been affirmed through landmark Supreme Court decisions.
- The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees liberty and equal protection, which courts have consistently interpreted to include autonomy in personal and family matters.
- Loving v. Virginia (1967) struck down bans on interracial marriage, ruling that the freedom to marry is a “basic civil right of man,” essential to individual identity and dignity.
- Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) recognized a constitutional right to marital privacy, establishing that the state cannot intrude on intimate family decisions.
- Lawrence v. Texas (2003) affirmed that adults have the right to engage in private intimate relationships without government criminalization.
- Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) recognized same-sex marriage nationwide, declaring that the Constitution protects the right of all couples to form a legally recognized family.
- Earlier American history, including the Founders’ emphasis on individual liberty and autonomy, laid the philosophical groundwork for these protections.
How American History Has Treated This Value
American progress has consistently moved toward expanding the freedom to love. Laws banning interracial marriage, criminalizing same-sex relationships, restricting contraception, or policing private relationships have repeatedly been overturned as unconstitutional violations of liberty and equality. Social movements, from civil rights to LGBTQ rights, have pushed courts and policymakers to recognize that intimate freedom is inseparable from basic human dignity. Although backlash and attempts to roll back rights continue, the long trajectory of U.S. law affirms that privacy and love are central components of American liberty.
Why This Value Is Not Partisan
The right to choose whom you love transcends party affiliation. Americans across the political spectrum cherish their freedom to build families according to their own values. The principle that government should not dictate personal relationships is deeply rooted in the country’s commitment to individual liberty. Efforts to restrict marriage, intimacy, or family autonomy conflict with constitutional principles and the lived experiences of millions of Americans.
Closing Principle
Privacy and love are essential expressions of personal liberty. Protecting the freedom to choose one’s partner and build a family is not a cultural preference — it is a constitutional commitment and a defining American value. A nation that honors freedom must honor the right to love.
If you want to understand what liberty feels like in everyday life, you don’t start with government or elections or grand theories of political philosophy. You start with something far more personal: the freedom to choose whom you love, and the freedom to build a life with that person on your own terms. This freedom may not always be spoken of in the same breath as speech or religion, yet it is just as foundational. Love is not merely an emotion — it is a commitment, a partnership, a shared future — and the ability to enter that commitment freely is one of the clearest expressions of personal autonomy a person can have. When the state interferes with love, it interferes with the very core of the individual.
The American tradition of liberty recognizes this, although it took generations to make that recognition clear in law. For much of our early history, governments tried to dictate the boundaries of intimate life: whom people could marry, which relationships society deemed acceptable, and which families were considered legitimate. But over time, Americans challenged those boundaries, and the country repeatedly reaffirmed that freedom in private life cannot be reconciled with state-imposed restrictions on love. Each time the nation has been confronted with the question of whether government may police intimacy, the answer has become more consistent: no.
One of the clearest turning points came with Loving v. Virginia in 1967, a case whose name seems almost poetic in hindsight. Mildred and Richard Loving, an interracial couple, were arrested in the middle of the night because their marriage violated Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws. They were sentenced to prison unless they agreed to leave the state. Their very existence as a family was treated as a crime. When the Supreme Court struck down those laws, it did more than invalidate a set of discriminatory statutes; it affirmed something profound about what it means to be free. The Court described marriage as a basic civil right, essential to the pursuit of happiness, and rooted in the dignity of the individual. It recognized that the state has no rightful power to dictate whom a person may love.
That principle deepened over the decades as Americans began to confront other forms of intimate discrimination. Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 established that married couples have a constitutional right to privacy in decisions about contraception — an acknowledgment that the state does not belong in the most intimate corners of family life. Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 overturned the criminalization of same-sex relationships, affirming that adults have the right to engage in private, consensual relationships without fear of prosecution. And Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 recognized that marriage equality is not a privilege granted to some, but a right held by all. These cases did not create new rights out of thin air; they recognized rights that were already implicit in the Constitution’s guarantees of liberty and equality.
What emerges from this long arc of jurisprudence is a simple truth: freedom means nothing if it does not extend to the choices that define our closest relationships. To tell someone they cannot marry the person they love is to deny them not only autonomy but dignity. To tell them their family is illegitimate is to impose shame where the state has no rightful authority. And to criminalize or dissolve relationships based on race, gender, or orientation is to reduce human beings to political categories rather than recognizing them as individuals with dreams, commitments, and identities of their own.
America’s history is full of families whose existence once challenged the boundaries of social convention. Interracial families who defied segregationist laws. Same-sex couples who built lives together in the shadows long before the courts acknowledged their rights. Blended families, adoptive families, families formed by choice as much as by blood. These families are as American as any others. They are embodiments of liberty — living proof that people can create meaning, stability, and love in forms that earlier generations did not foresee. The country has grown stronger, not weaker, because individuals have been free to shape their own intimate lives.
Opposition to this freedom has always rested on the same flawed belief: that government should enforce one particular moral vision onto everyone else. But the American tradition runs in the opposite direction. In a pluralistic society, the purpose of government is not to impose the values of one group; it is to protect the freedom of all. When someone demands that the state restrict whom others may love, they are not defending tradition — they are undermining the very concept of liberty. They are asking the government to take sides in matters that properly belong to individuals. A country that permits such control is not free, no matter how loudly it proclaims itself to be.
Privacy in intimate life is not a fringe value. It is not a modern invention. It is woven into the Constitution’s promise that no person shall be deprived of liberty without due process. It is connected to the deepest strands of American political philosophy, from the idea of unalienable rights to the belief that individuals possess inherent dignity simply by virtue of being human. The founders may not have predicted the specific forms our modern families would take, but they understood that liberty requires a sphere of personal autonomy where government cannot intrude.
The freedom to love is a test of national character. It asks whether the United States will honor its promise of equality, whether it will protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority, and whether it will trust its citizens to shape their own lives. Each time the country has answered yes, it has grown more just. Each time it has answered no, it has revealed its fear.
We often talk about liberty in grand, abstract terms. But liberty is lived in quiet, intimate moments: two people choosing one another; a family growing into something unique; a home built on affection and trust. These moments deserve the same respect and legal protection as any political right, because they are foundational to what it means to be fully human.
America is at its best when it stands on the side of love. Not because love is political, but because the freedom to love — freely, openly, and without fear — is one of the clearest expressions of the liberty this country was created to protect.