South Carolina is actually arguing that the original intent of the Fourteenth Amendment was only regarding equal protection under the law for Blacks — it wasn't until the mid-50s that the Supreme Court started applying it to other groups like women and Hispanics — so all those Originalists on the SCOTUS today should oppose extending its protection to gays.
Indeed, the Congress that passed the 14th Amendment was adamant that it didn't apply to things like married women actually being able to own their own property, or women being able to testify in court or sign contracts.
So if the Original Intent of the 14th Amendment was that discrimination against women was still okay, certainly it shouldn't be used to protect homosexuals, right?
The scary thing is, I'll bet there are at least two or three of the Justices that actually think the same thing.
The scarier thing is that, based on their argument, South Caroline thinks it could reinstate legal discrimination against women, under the 14th Amendment. Not, they have since stated, that they plan to. Yet.
South Carolina to SCOTUS: We Can Discriminate Against Women, So Why Not Gays?
One key problem with originalism—the theory that the Constitution should be interpreted as its drafters understood it—is that the men who wrote our constitution had some pretty barbaric views about humanity. The author of the Bill of Rights, James Madison, owned hundreds of slaves. The same Congress that passed the…
Next up, 14th amendment applies only to blacks who have been enslaved