Bad as it is now — it is about to get worse with the Supremes making all states comply... like they did with abortion.
Simply put, what activist justices don’t want citizens to know about 14A is following. Regardless that activist justices are now using 14A to create politically correct rights, 14A’s Equal Protections Clause (EPC) in the example of gay marriage, the Supreme Court had historically clarified that the 14th Amendment didn’t add any new rights to the Constitution. It only strengthens rights which have been expressly amended to the Constitution by the states.
“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.
In fact, the Court’s clarification of 14A reflects the official clarification of 14A by John Bingham, Bingham the main author of Section 1 of 14A where the EPC is found.
“Mr. Speaker, this House may safely follow the example of the makers of the Constitution and the builders of the Republic, by passing laws for enforcing all the privileges and immunities of the United States as guaranteed by the amended Constitution and expressly enumerated in the Constitution [emphasis added].” — Congressional Globe, House of Representatives, 42nd Congress, 1st Session. (See lower half of third column.)
So since the states have never amended the Constitution to expressly protect either abortion or gay marriage, activist justices and judges actually have no constitutionally enumerated gay marriage or abortion rights to apply to the states via 14A.
Therefore, the states are actually free to make laws which discriminate against constitutionally unprotected abortion and gay marriage imo, as long as such laws don’t also unreasonably abridge constitutionally enumerated rights.
Sadly, it is only because we haven’t been teaching our children the Constitution, particularly 10th Amendment-protected state powers versus constitutionally express personal rights, the absence of such rights in the case of abortion and gay marriage, that our corrupt judicial system has been able to get away with amending new rights to the Constitution from the bench.
I fear you are correct.