......the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happeness. Clauses of the constitution which allow equal access and protection. Where did you get the idea that they couldn’t?
I can see that you thoroughly dodged my question.
However, since I think you're sincere (wrong, but sincere) I'll try to answer yours. The right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is not an open ended abstraction. It doesn't mean I have the right to do anything I please, and to additionally demand societal or state ratification for my actions. I can't open up a brothel, for example. Nor can I practice polygamy. Nor can I marry my sister. Nor can I use crack cocaine. Nor can I sell heroin. I can't flout a legitimate law and justify it on the grounds that I'm merely pursuing happiness as I define it.
As for "equal protection", that term was never intended to mean what you and others seem to think it means. I'll give you a very good, and totally definitive, demonstration of this. The equal protection clause is in the 14th Amendment. Yet, it took another amendment (the 19th), ratified nearly sixty years later, to give women a federally guaranteed right to vote. If the equal protection clause means that the states can't "discriminate" in any way, then why didn't it give women the vote? The answer is that the term "equal protection of the laws" does not mean that states can't discriminate in their laws. It means that if a law is enacted, that everyone who is covered by it (i.e., to whom it is germane) would have equal access to the courts to seek adjudication.
That's why it didn't give women the vote. It didn't give blacks the vote, either. That was accomplished by the 15th Amendment, ratified **after** the 14th Amendment with its equal protection clause. So the equal protection clause didn't give blacks the vote.
Yet, we're told today that that clause means the Boy Scouts can't use the public parks until the have homosexual scoutmasters, that we can't require people to show ID to vote, that we can't exclude women from VMI, and all kinds of other nonsense that never had a darn thing to do with the equal protection clause as initially written and ratified. In other words, it does not have anything whatsoever to do with the same sex "marriage" issue. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. The courts have rewritten this clause via deliberate misinterpretation and application, and they have perverted the concept of liberty as well.