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I'll agree that **SOME** rights are pre-existing. The Founding Fathers clearly believed that.

However, what I asked is why it took a constitutional amendment to give women a federally guaranteed right to vote. Why didn't the 9th & 14th amendments do it? Why did it take the 19th amendment, many decades after the ratification of either the 9th or 14th?

The reason is that you are simply in error about what the 9th & 14th amendments are for. The 9th amendment does not give the federal courts the authority to enforce any rights at all. They can't order a state to give women the vote under that amendment. They can't order a state to legalize sodomy. The 14th amendment doesn't change that. That's why the suffragettes had to amend the constitution, decades AFTER both of those amendments were ratified, to make female suffrage a constitutional issue addressable in the federal courts.

The 9th amendment merely says that the federal government (including the courts) can't stop a state from recognizing additional rights beyond those listed in the Bill of Rights. It doesn't say a state has to recognize them. Nor does it empower the federal courts to do anything about it if they don't. It also stops the federal government from interfering with such rights. Thus, states were free to give women the vote, but didn't have to. It took the 19th amendment to REQUIRE states to grant female suffrage.

You stated that, among other things, we have always had a right to sodomy (you called it "buggery") and that women have always had a right to vote. But that simply is not true. The Founding Fathers were very strong believers in the concept that some rights are pre-existent, yet they had no objections at all to anti-sodomy laws and never even entertained the possibility that women should be voting. It took a constitutional amendment to give women a federally guaranteed right to vote. It would take a similar amendment to impose legalized abortion or legalized sodomy on the states as well.

At least, it SHOULD take constitutional amendments to do that. The reason it didn't is because outlaw, arrogant, power-crazed leftist judges took it upon themselves to impose their personal policy preferences on the states via a series of unconstitutional rulings.

This was done under the mantra of "privacy rights", though sometimes they also invoke "liberty" as a justification (they waffle so much because the whole thing is made up out of thin air). The result is what Aristotle called "arbitrary government". We're governed not by the rule of law, but by the rule, or whims, of men. Why, for example, is homosexual sodomy protected by privacy but incest is not? There's no explanation.

You mentioned wishing away provisions of the Constitution, and on that you are correct. We can't, and shouldn't do that. Unfortunately, the sodomy ruling handed down two days ago wished away the 9th amendment, the 10th amendment, and the provision that says the Constitution can only be changed by the amendment process, not by five judges deciding that it "needs" to change.

I've read some posts here where people express hope that this "privacy" concept can be used to strike down IRS regulations, gun control laws, or even drug laws. Well, don't hold your breath. The "privacy" concept is not a principle created by honorable judges, intended to be applied even-handedly across the board. It's a power grab by fanatical leftists. They use it to strike down laws they disagree with, but not laws they agree with, even though the latter group of laws may violate privacy, as they've defined it, just as much as the former. So we get rulings based not on the law, but on the personal opinion of the judges. If five judges don't agree with a law, it gets struck down. If only four don't agree with it, it gets upheld by one vote.