80% of Americans have never read the document
Neither have the judges, or the clerks (mostly gay clerks, it seems) who crank out the opinions they sign.
80% Try 95% or greater and that includes a vast majority of lawyers, even constitutional lawyers. Do you really believe that Elana Kagan EVER read the Constitution? Do you really believe Obama ever read the constitution? I doubt it. Affirmative Action all the way. Right to the SCOTUS and the POTUS!
"80% of Americans have never read the document"
I agree. If you tell people that the "Equal Protections Clause" is in the Declaration of Independence, Google would probably see many requests for the DoI, Thomas Jefferson's "all men are created equal," good enough for them.
As mentioned in related threads, the Supreme Court case of Minor v. Happersett indicates the following about the 14th Amendment's Equal Protections Clause. Virginia Minor had argued that her citizenship in conjunction with the Equal Protections Clause of the then recently ratified 14th Amendment gave her the right to vote regardless that she was a woman. The Supreme Court didn't buy her argument, however, but clarified that the 14th Amendment did not introduce any new constitutional protections; it only strengthened constitutionally enumerated rights.
“3. The right of suffrage was not necessarily one of the privileges or immunities of citizenship before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, and that amendment does not add to these privileges and immunities. It simply furnishes additional guaranty for the protection of such as the citizen already had [emphasis added].” —Minor v. Happersett, 1874.
So since the states had never amended the Constitution to expressly protect woman sufferage, women didn't have the constitutional right to vote before or after 14A was ratified.
So this means that women shouldn't be voting now, right?
Wrong!
Virginia Minor's efforts to establish woman sufferage weren't wasted because the states subsequently ratified the 19th Amendment to the Constitution which effectively gave women the right to vote.
On the other hand, it remains that since the states have never amended the Constitution to expressly protect so-called gay rights, such "rights" remain unconstitutionally protected. But it is presently ultimately up to a given state's legal majority voters as to whether or not their state recognizes gay agenda issues like gay marriage.
What's currently going on with judges overturning state prohibitions on gay marriage by state lawmakers and voter referendums is this imo. Pro-gay activist judges are taking advantage of low-information voters, including evidently low-information state lawmakers, who have probably never been taught about the importance of constitutionally enumerated rights, such judges wrongly legislating such rights from the bench.