Is there such a thing as an unamendable Constitution? Can’t the provision against amendment itself be amended?
When I was clerking at the Indiana Judicial Center we law clerks had a discussion about these things. We called them “Prospective Repealers” and the consensus was that they could not be binding on a future legislature. However, in this case, if you read the first section of Article VII, as slavery being a “fundamental right” before all others, the Kansas Supreme Court could hold that slavery is a “fundamental natural law” that cannot be abridged, including by Constitutional Amendment. The inclusion of Section 14 of the Adopting Schedule was a reaffirmation of that.
These provisions were not unknown in the Constitutions of southern states generally. For my “We The People” team last year, I reviewed a number of those prewar Constitutions, and most of the slave states had similar provisions. When it came down to “state’s rights” as the basis for secession, it appears that in most of these states the only right they really cared about was the “right” to own other human beings as property. And they really didn’t intend to let it go.
These provisions in the Lecompton Constitution show that the slaveowning politicians in Kansas saw their state as being 100% southern in all aspects of its organization and operation.
To say that a Constitution is unamendable is to make a vain attempt to rob posterity of its God-given, unalienable right to government by consent.
Of course, such a silly requirement would be completely unenforceable anyhow, the attempted perpetrators having passed on, and the intended victims being alive and in control.