opinion issued on October 15, 1971, authored by Justice C. Donald Peterson, the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the trial court's dismissal. Based on the common usage of the term "marriage" and gender-specific references elsewhere in the same chapter, the Court held that the statutes prohibited marriage between persons of the same sex. This restriction, the Court reasoned, did not offend the Due Process Clause because procreation and child rearing were central to the constitutional protection given to marriage. With respect to the claim of an equal-protection violation, the Court found that childless marriages presented no more than a theoretical imperfection in the state's rationale for limiting marriage to different-sex couples. It found the plaintiffs' reliance on the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in Loving v. Virginia, finding an anti-miscegenation law unconstitutional, failed to provide a parallel: "in commonsense and in a constitutional sense, there is a clear distinction between a marital restriction based merely upon race and one based upon the fundamental difference in sex." The Court acknowledged that Justice Goldberg's concurrence in Griswold v. Connecticut, which argued that criminalizing the possession of contraceptives violated the right to marital privacy, found support for marital privacy partly in the Ninth Amendment, but the Court distinguished Griswold and found no authority for the Ninth Amendment being binding on the states. The Court dismissed the plaintiffs' claims under the First and Eighth Amendments without discussion. Appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court Baker and McConnell appealed the Minnesota court's opinion to the U.S. Supreme Court. There, they claimed that the marriage statute, as construed, implicated three rights: it abridged their fundamental right to marry under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; discriminated based on gender, contrary to the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; and deprived them of privacy rights flowing from the Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Hennepin County had argued that the marriage license issued previously made this case moot which, in retrospect, was correct. On October 10, 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a one-sentence order stating "The appeal is dismissed for want of a substantial federal question." In most cases presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court's refusal to hear the case is not an endorsement of the decision below. However, since this case came to the Court through mandatory appellate review, the summary dismissal is a decision on the merits of the