Equal protection? What is that?

I have taken a narrow view.

But already in the mid 1870s it was read as protecting access to public accommodations and services on equal terms and equality (nondiscrimination) in hiring, admissions, etc.

So maybe so broad an understanding was the actual intent of at least some of those who favored its adoption.

And perhaps its vagueness was strategic, the only way it could get enough support from people who had conflicting ideas what they wanted it to mean to be adopted.

Much like the ERA - which, by the way, might seem to ban laws denying fathers any say in a woman's choice whether or not to get an abortion.

The rejoinder that everyone has an equal right to terminate his own pregnancy is a little too much like the erstwhile defense of the legal non-existence of same sex marriage that everyone had an equal right to marry a person of the opposite sex.

Robert Brown Elliott, "The Civil Rights Bill," January 6, 1874.

Reading Smith.