An important point made here and linked by you is that the ratification of the 14th is a fraud. Joe Fallon also wrote a rather succinct article on this. The only conclusion that anyone can make about it, after reading the history, is that it was extorted from many of the 'states' (in quotes, because they had temporarily ceased to exist when the 14th was rammed through).
Funny, but you never hear the ACLU or anyone else mentioning that little fact prior to invoking it.
Whatever uncertainty there might be about whether the First Amendment is gathered into the scope of judicial review, there is none whatever about the proposition that, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights, it was intended to restrain only the national government and not the states or their subdivisions. And, among scholars who do not hold a prior commitment to judicial activism, a second proposition is virtually settled as well: that the Fourteenth Amendment changed nothing about that fact.
(see footnote 134)Of course, on the Court the debate has gone all the other way, so that Justices Scalia and Thomas no less than their more liberal brethren act unquestioningly on the basis of twentieth-century precedents that declared that much of the Bill of Rights is selectively ''absorbed'' or ''incorporated'' into the terms of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But these precedents are worse than doubtful: they represent a plain usurpation of power by the Court, and they ought not to be respected, on or off the Court, by anyone who regards the Constitution as superior to ''constitutional law.''The Fourteenth Amendment is certainly the major ''culprit'' if we are concerned about reining in the Court.
By ''incorporation'' of the Bill of Rights, and by creating under the doctrine of ''substantive due process'' rights which are contained nowhere in the Constitution at all, the Court has used the Fourteenth Amendment to nationalize some of the most important policy questions that the Constitution properly leaves to the states.
PREPARED STATEMENT OF MATTHEW J. FRANCK, CHAIRMAN AND ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, RADFORD UNIVERSITY Congress, the Court, and the Constitution