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In Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court held that same-sex marriage bans violate the Equal Protection Clause for two primary reasons. First, they subordinate; they send the message that lesbians and gays are inferior to heterosexuals. Second, they unequally deny lesbian and gay individuals the liberty to make fundamental decisions about identity and self. These two conjoined themes—anti-group subordination and pro-individual liberty—comprise the two pillars of "equal dignity" that anchor Obergefell's holding. This Article proposes that these pillars also support the Court's anti-stereotyping jurisprudence, and equal dignity is thus one important aspect of what the Equal Protection Clause protects. To illustrate: in sex discrimination cases, courts reject state stereotyping when it perpetuates ideas about men's and women's roles and reinforces women's inferior social status; in transgender and sexual orientation discrimination cases, courts have begun to protect LGBTQ individuals from state demands for conformity to normative stereotypes about how to be a man or woman. Protecting individuals' equal dignity can sometimes become complicated when the reasons for addressing a group's purported needs elide individual concerns and attachments. For example, the government sometimes relies on normative and statistical information about groups to combat group-associated health and poverty risks, to remedy individual disparate treatment, and to prevent wholesale group exclusion from opportunities and civic duties. Addressing these group-based needs, however, may effectively perpetuate stereotypes about what group membership means. Individual group members may object to the identitarian implications of the government's help. Not all stereotyping both subordinates a group and denies individuals the liberty to be and express who they are. Accordingly, stereotyping is not wrong in and of itself; how the government uses stereotypes should determine whether state action violates the Equal Protection Clause. ...

This article examines the role of courts in rural sexual minorities' lives. It focuses first on state action, explaining that courts' failure to apply heightened scrutiny to sexual orientation classifications harms rural sexual minorities uniquely in family and employment law contexts, where judges explicitly invoke antigay rural norms to justify discriminatory treatment. It argues that by taking rural sexual minorities' relative political powerlessness into account in Equal Protection claims, courts are more likely to find that all sexual orientation classifications are suspect. It focuses second on private discrimination, and it discusses ways to protect and strengthen rural sexual minorities' privacy rights. It argues that privacy is central to protecting sexual minorities' liberty to live, create families, and work in rural environments.