Courts in various jurisdictions have relied on either the right to privacy or the right to equality to offer protections to the LGBTQ+ community. While the use of different rights to achieve similar ends may seem like a distinction without a difference, the difference in the nature of each right along with the accompanying remedies, points to the difference in the nature of constitutionalism practiced across various jurisdictions. Courts operating in the traditional liberal democratic constitutional paradigm tend to construct privacy as a negative right, restricting the state from interfering in the intimate relationships between individuals. However, courts operating within a transformative constitutional framework rely on the right to equality to impose duties upon the state to guarantee equal moral membership to all members of society. This is not a mere theoretical distinction, as the remedies granted by these courts vary based on the paradigm they operate under. This chapter examines the reliance on these rights in the context of legalizing same-sex marriages. It shows that courts in the transformative constitutional paradigm have interpreted equality to abandon default verticality, that is the legal tradition of situating private relationships and community conventions outside of the constitutional mould, instead subjecting societal mores to constitutional morality.