The three Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution were, as the term suggests, ratified in the wake of the Civil War. These days, according to Daily Kos writer Jon Perr, conservatives are generally OK with the anti-slavery 13th Amendment but have watered down the 15th, which abolished racial restrictions on voting, and reserve their “greatest and most visceral…scorn” for the 14th, as indicated by the hubbub over matters such as birthright citizenship.
“After all,” Perr declared in a Sunday piece, “many on the right still seek to deny to African Americans, Latino Americans and gay Americans due process and equal protection of the laws promised to ‘all persons born or naturalized in the United States.’ Instead, as growing numbers of Republicans insist, those 14th Amendment rights are limited to corporations and fetuses, neither of which are an actual person at all.”
From Perr’s post (bolding added):
Only the most fervent practitioners of the GOP's Southern Strategy regret the 13th Amendment's abolition of slavery. But with its draconian voter ID laws, the modern Republican Party has made a mockery of the 15th Amendment's guarantee that the franchise will not be "denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
Yet it is the 14th Amendment that elicits the greatest and most visceral conservative scorn. After all, many on the right still seek to deny to African Americans, Latino Americans and gay Americans due process and equal protection of the laws promised to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States." Instead, as growing numbers of Republicans insist, those 14th Amendment rights are limited to corporations and fetuses, neither of which are an actual person at all…
Consider, for example, birthright citizenship…[D]uring a period in which illegal immigration from our southern border has dropped to net zero, some of the GOP's best and brightest insist that some people are more equal than others…
Meanwhile, another group of Republicans wants to confer citizenship on those who haven't been born at all.
As we learned during the Aug. 7 GOP presidential debate, some Republicans are claiming that the 14th Amendment's due process and equal protection rights apply to fetuses…
The corollary for conservatives, of course, is that the 14th Amendment's protections do not apply to American women…The GOP disdain for "the health of the mother" isn't just reflected in the hundreds of draconian anti-abortion regulations passed just since 2010…
…[O]nly a declining share [of conservatives] still insist the 14th Amendment doesn't apply to LGBT Americans. Unfortunately, they—and their candidates—dominate the Republican presidential field…
What many conservatives are now claiming out loud is that the 14th Amendment's guarantees of due process and equal protection don't really extend to "all persons," but only to those of whom they approve.
