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Equal rights protection clause9/12/2023 ![]() Connecticut (1965), the Supreme Court ruled that a state ban on the use of contraceptives violated a couple’s right to marital privacy, which according to the Court was an essential liberty protected under the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause. ![]() It protects individuals (or corporations) from infringement by the states as well as the federal government. In practice, the Supreme Court has used the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment to guarantee some of the most fundamental rights and liberties we enjoy today. Due process ensures that all levels of government operate within the law and provide fair procedures for everyone. The fundamental principle of due process goes back to the Magna Carta, the 13th century English charter that inspired the framers of the U.S. ![]() The two most important provisions of the 14th Amendment guarantee that states, like the federal government, cannot “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.” What is Due Process? While the 13th and 15th Amendments were relatively limited in scope-the first abolished slavery and the second granted voting rights to black men-the 14th Amendment exponentially expanded the protection of civil rights for all Americans. Constitution designed to grant full citizenship rights to formerly enslaved people. Ratified in 1868, it was one of three amendments to the U.S. law, these essential rights belong not only to American citizens, but also corporations-thanks to a few key Supreme Court cases and a controversial legal concept known as corporate personhood. Wade) and same-sex marriage ( Obergefell v. Constitution, and has been at the center of many of the most famous Supreme Court decisions, including school desegregation ( Brown v. It’s been cited in more litigation than any other amendment to the U.S. Forcing religious students to attend a state funded school that is permeated with an atmosphere that is hostile to religion violates the Fourteenth Amendment.Originally adopted after the Civil War to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people, the 14th Amendment has exponentially expanded the protection of civil rights for all Americans over the past 150 years. In our view, the Fourteenth Amendment obligates the states to provide students with education vouchers that they can redeem either at a secular or at a religious school depending on parental choice. We conclude, perhaps most strikingly, by arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment's ban on discrimination on the basis of religion renders the current system of funding the public schools unconstitutional. We analyze the impact our equal protection argument might have on Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause caselaw, and we explain why in our view State constitutional Blaine amendments forbidding government money from going to religious entities violate the Fourteenth Amendment. Caroline Products Footnote Four which specifically mentions religion as a suspect classification 3) as not being precluded by any prior Supreme Court caselaw 4) as reflecting the fact that religious affiliation is in some faiths hereditary and immutable and 5) as being consistent with the ban on discrimination on the basis of religion in almost every equal protection clause in every foreign constitution or international human rights document that we have surveyed. We defend our argument that the Fourteenth Amendment bans discrimination on the basis of religion as being: 1) consistent with and mandated by the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment 2) as following logically from the seminal logic in United States v. Martinez in which a 5 to 4 majority of the Court wrongly allowed a California state school to discriminate against a Christian Legal Society chapter on the basis of religion. We thus challenge the Supreme Court's recent decision in Christian Legal Society v. State action that discriminates on the basis of religion should be subject to strict scrutiny and should almost always be held unconstitutional. This article argues that state action that discriminates on the basis of religion is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Doctrine even if it does not violate the Establishment Clause or the Free Exercise Clause as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment.
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