So, as it turns out, the 14th Amendment was not intended to forbid states from only issuing marriage licenses to couples consisting of one male and one female, nor intended to be a bar to every imaginable type of discrimination.
The 14th amendment isn't limited to issues of race. Its limited to what it says. And what is stays is this:
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
From Section 1 of the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution
If a State does any of that, the federal courts can intervene. And have, repeatedly.
There is nothing mentioned in what you cite from the 14th Amendment prohibiting a State to make distinctions based upon sex when issuing a marriage license. That notion is an invention of our Supreme Court and particularly Justice Ginsburg who never established her notion as fact.
For example, in delivering the Court’s opinion in the
Virginia Military Institute (VMI) case, decided June 26, 1996, which commanded the Institute to accept women by citing the 14th Amendment as forbidding sex discrimination, Ginsburg pointed to a number of “tests” invented by the Court unknown to our founding fathers and asserted a party seeking to uphold government action making a distinction based upon sex must establish an
"exceedingly persuasive justification" In addition, Ginsburg noted,
“The justification must be genuine, not hypothesized or invented post hoc in response to litigation. And it must not rely on overbroad generalizations about the different talents, capacities, or preferences of males and females.”
But the fact remains, Ginsburg, in delivering the opinion, never established that under the 14th Amendment the people of America decided to prohibit distinctions based upon “sex” in addition to their intentional prohibition against state legislation based upon “race and color”! And, the fact remains, Justice Ginsburg couldn’t establish this constitutional prohibition (sex discrimination) because time and again during the debates which framed the 14th Amendment the intended prohibition against discrimination was identified as being limited to discrimination based upon
“race, color, or former condition of slavery”, and only intended to apply in a very narrow area and protect the inalienable right of Blacks:
“to make and enforce contracts, to sue...to inherit, purchase...property as was then enjoyed by white citizens. “Congress did not assume...to adjust what may be called the social rights of men...but only to declare and vindicate these fundamental rights.”___ see the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3,22 (1883)
The argument that the wording in the 14th Amendment: (a)“all persons”, (b)"No State shall make any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of United States.", (c) "[N]or deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws", as being evidence the 14th Amendment was intended to forbid distinctions based upon sex, or intended to be a universal rule to bar every imaginable type of discrimination, such as in Martin vs. PGA Tour and also include discrimination based upon sex, falls flat on its face when reading the words of next Amendment to the Constitution! This Amendment (the 15th) prohibits a new type of discrimination not covered by the 14th Amendment! It prohibits discrimination, or to be more accurate, prohibits the right of voting to be denied or abridged on account of
“race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The intent of the 15th Amendment clearly being to enlarge the intended prohibition on state legislated race based discrimination mentioned in the 14th Amendment, and enlarging it to include the prohibition at the voting booth ---forbidding discrimination at the voting booth to be based upon
“race, color, or previous condition of servitude“, while gender, and in particularly females, were not yet included in the protection.
The argument that the 14th Amendment prohibits state discrimination based upon gender, becomes even weaker when reading the 19th Amendment which specifically forbids a new kind of discrimination. In this Amendment, the People of America decide to forbid gender discrimination [the discrimination mentioned by Ginsburg] but only extend the prohibition with respect to the right to vote being
“denied or abridged” on account of
“sex”
If the 14th Amendment prohibited every kind of discrimination, including discrimination based upon sex as Ginsburg alleged in the VMI Case, then why were these subsequent Amendments added to the Constitution after the adoption of the 14th Amendment?
Finally, why would there have been a proposed and so-call equal rights amendment attempted to be added to the Constitution of the United States in the 1980’s to prohibit sex discrimination but which never received the required number of ratifying States, if the 14th Amendment already prohibited discrimination based upon sex as Ginsburg alleges?
Bottom line is, our SC, including Justice Ginsburg, is acting in rebellion to our written Constitution and the documented intentions and beliefs under which it was adopted. Indeed, our Supreme Court is in fact "legislating from the bench" so as to impose its own visions and court ordered social reforms using a variety of tests which switch the subject of a law’s constitutionality, to a question of the lawmakers wisdom and what the court arbitrarily decides is “reasonable“, which, as we have seen over the years reflects what progressives on the Court arbitrarily fancy as social justice, and not the rule of law as defined and limited in our Constitution.
In fact, a questioned law to pass Ginsburg’s test, must have an
"exceedingly persuasive justification" and
“The justification must be genuine, not hypothesized or invented post hoc in response to litigation”, regardless of whether or not the law is within the four corners of our Constitution which no longer appears to be an important factor to Ginsburg and her progressive friends on the Court.
JWK
Those who reject abiding by the intentions and beliefs under which our Constitution was agree to, as those intentions and beliefs may be documented from historical records, wish to remove the anchor and rudder of our constitutional system so they may then be free to “interpret” the Constitution to mean whatever they wish it to mean.