I knew that this amendment was the "equal protection under the law" amendment, but I never realized that this part of the overall "screw the South" Reconstruction thing, which I frankly think was a good idea. It's interesting that it led the way not only to Brown vs the Board of Education, Roe vs Wade, pro-privacy decisions, and all sorts of cool and progressive things.
Section 2 never got enforced too much, so we needed a Voting Rights Act. Section 1 has come back into the news, since it is this section that has permitted the mass insanity of tens of millions of "anchor babies" of illegal Mesoamerican immigrants.
Sections 3 and 4 are not relevant anymore, but they were clearly intended to screw the South bigtime. I never realized that Robert E. Lee had his citizenship revoked. This section is obviously the source of the conservative "giving aid and comfort to our enemies" bullshit during the Vietnam War.
Section 4 is of historical interest because the South claimed that the human property that they owned was capital and they said they needed to be compensated for it. Freeing their human property with paying the slavemasters off was a "taking". Yes, Americans actually had great big arguments about bullshit like this. Hard to believe, huh?
Neo-confederates, Republicans and other nefarious characters have advanced arguments against the 14th Amendment. One was that the Southern states only ratified as they were occupied by Northern troops with Northern-installed Reconstruction regimes in office, hence the votes were fraudulent.
Samuel Alito, a frighteningly reactionary man who was treacherously allowed onto our Supreme Court by wimpy Democrats, hates the 14th Amendment and has called for its repeal. The 14th Amendment is the boogieman of the Southern-dominated Federalist Movement that came out of the Reagan years.
On the more literate White nationalist sites, the Amendment comes in for regular excoriation. It's always been a voodoo doll for the neo-Confederates.
It's nice to understand why.
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