![]() The 14th Amendment also included provisions relating to voting and representation in Congress. For the first time, civil rights were to be protected at the federal level, not left to the states. This represented a major shift in power between the states and the federal government. No person could be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process (fair treatment by the judicial system), and the law was to be equally applied to everyone. The 14th Amendment revoked the Black Codes by declaring that states could not pass laws that denied citizens their constitutional rights and freedoms. The state needs our vote, to make the state loyal to the Union, and to bring its laws and administration into harmony with the present dearly bought policy of the country, and we respectfully suggest that had the constitution of South Carolina been heretofore, as we now ask that it shall be hereafter, this state would never have led one third of the United States into treason against the nation.įor this object, your petitioners will as in duty bound, ever pray &c. We the undersigned colored citizens of South Carolina, do respectfully ask your Honorable Body, in consideration of our unquestioned loyalty, exhibited by us alike as bond or free -as soldier or laborer -in the Union lines under the protection of the government or within the rebel lines under the domination of the rebellion that in the exercise of your high authority, over the re-establishment of civil government in South Carolina, our equal rights before the law may be respected - that in the formation and adoption of the fundamental law of the state, we may have an equal voice with all loyal citizens and that your Honorable Body will not sanction any state Constitution, which does not secure the exercise of the right of the elective franchise to all loyal citizens, otherwise qualified in common course of American law, without distinction of Color - Without this political privilege we will have no security for our personal rights and no means to secure the blessings of education to our children. ![]() To the Honorable Senate and House of Representatives in Congress assembled. Forcing religious students to attend a state funded school that is permeated with an atmosphere that is hostile to religion violates the Fourteenth Amendment.Read the transcript of the Petition of Colored Citizens of South Carolina for Equal Rights Before the Law, and the Elective Franchise, 1865: In our view, the Fourteenth Amendment obligates the states to provide students with education vouchers that they can redeem either at a secular or at a religious school depending on parental choice. We conclude, perhaps most strikingly, by arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment's ban on discrimination on the basis of religion renders the current system of funding the public schools unconstitutional. We analyze the impact our equal protection argument might have on Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause caselaw, and we explain why in our view State constitutional Blaine amendments forbidding government money from going to religious entities violate the Fourteenth Amendment. Caroline Products Footnote Four which specifically mentions religion as a suspect classification 3) as not being precluded by any prior Supreme Court caselaw 4) as reflecting the fact that religious affiliation is in some faiths hereditary and immutable and 5) as being consistent with the ban on discrimination on the basis of religion in almost every equal protection clause in every foreign constitution or international human rights document that we have surveyed. We defend our argument that the Fourteenth Amendment bans discrimination on the basis of religion as being: 1) consistent with and mandated by the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment 2) as following logically from the seminal logic in United States v. ![]() Martinez in which a 5 to 4 majority of the Court wrongly allowed a California state school to discriminate against a Christian Legal Society chapter on the basis of religion. We thus challenge the Supreme Court's recent decision in Christian Legal Society v. State action that discriminates on the basis of religion should be subject to strict scrutiny and should almost always be held unconstitutional. This article argues that state action that discriminates on the basis of religion is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Doctrine even if it does not violate the Establishment Clause or the Free Exercise Clause as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment.
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