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Well, fine, I understand you reject the 14th (I suspected that from the beginning) and you may if you wish rely upon your view of judicial activism to sustain that position, but the fact remains that the ultimate victory of incorporation demonstrates the power of the natural law dynamic that drove the constitutional project, and that dynamic, not incorporation per se, was my point.

As for Wallbuilders, I would be fascinated to know why you think it is important that you have “outed” Mr. Barton as a pseudo-historian. After all, if you will read my earlier post carefully, you will see I did not quote Mr. Barton at all, unless you count the placement of ellipses. All I did was quote the Founders directly. To which of these signatories to the Constitution do you direct your antipathy? Is Mr. Barton really the problem, or do you dismiss the quotes for their inconvenient content, using Mr. Barton’s controversiality as mere pretext?

but the fact remains that the ultimate victory of incorporation demonstrates the power of the natural law dynamic

Dubious. The incorporation doctrine was a victory for judicial activism and nothing more. It was an explicit repudiation of the doctrine of federalism as ascribed to by the majority of the founders, and it obtained no real sanction of any significance from the court until the 20th century. That alone should cast doubt upon any "natural law" legacy to this insipid doctrine, which has been far more frequently employed to expand the power of the federal government at the expense of individual rights than it has been used to protect them (witness the removal of Christian religion from public places, the erosion of the 4th amendment, and abortion, all of which have been justified under the specious incorporation doctrine). And if you find even that evidence insufficient, at least take note that there is also inherent repudiation of natural law in the life of the main judicial proponent of the incorporation concept, Justice Hugo Black, a doctrinaire FDR New Dealer and former Ku Klux Klansman.

As to Barton's pseudo-history, you are the one who chose to link to the Wallbuilders page - not me. And yes, it casts doubt on your credibility every bit as much as if you were to link to some marxist revisionary like Eric Foner or some regurgitated incorporationist "social justice" crap published in the Nation. And the ellipses are precisely the issue as Barton has a 20+ year history of utilizing them to remove historical quotations (or at least those he hasn't fabricated outright, which he also has a history of doing) from their original context and meaning.

And I should also note that you still leave the issue of the incorporation doctrine's 20th century origins unanswered. It is no trivial point that this doctrine directly contradicts the explicitly stated constitutional doctrine of federalism set up by the founders. It is also no small matter that the court directly repudiated any claimed incorporation from the 14th amendment less than a year after its adoption. That leads us to one inescapable conclusion: incorporation was invented out of thin air by judges living several generations after the people who actually wrote the constitution and its relevant amendments were dead.

You obviously find authority in the words of the founders on other matters. By what then, other than inconvenience, do you so flippantly dismiss what they had to say against incorporation?