the entire conservative legal project, since ratification of those amendments during Reconstruction to the present day, has been to limit the scope and effectiveness of this “new” Constitution.
William F. Buckley Jr., the late conservative pundit and founder of NATIONAL REVIEW magazine, famously described the role of a conservative as being one who "stands athwart history, yelling, 'Stop!', at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it." The past century and a half of American history has basically been white, Christian, heterosexual males fighting a desperate rear-guard action to stop or slow the march of progress and preserve their historic place at the top of the social order. That they've been as abominably successful as they have is a searing indictment of the abject failure of the rest of us to do our part in stopping them.
