Quotes About Equal Protection

#1. Gay and lesbian people are equal. They deserve equal protection of the laws, and they deserve it now.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#2. NoH8 on the Hill, NoH8 anywhere. No American, regardless of who they love, should be denied equal protection under the law. History is on our side and our march towards justice will prevail.

Xavier Becerra

#3. The South began acting in outright defiance of the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which granted the right to due process and equal protection to anyone born in the United States, and it ignored the Fifteenth Amendment of 1880, which guaranteed all men the right to vote.

Isabel Wilkerson

#4. As members of the judiciary tasked with intervening to carry out the guarantee of equal protection, we ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society.

Sonia Sotomayor

#5. Syria, for all its problems, at least has a constitution that guarantees equal protection of citizens. Around the world, we have seen that this is essential where Christians are a minority and are not protected.

Franklin Graham

#6. We must have our freedom now. We must have the right to vote. We must have equal protection of the law.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#7. I do accept that, with - with respect to those vague terms in the Constitution such as equal protection of the laws, due process of law, cruel and unusual punishments. I fully accept that those things have to apply to new phenomena that didn't exist at the time.

Antonin Scalia

#8. Full participation in government and society has been a basic right of the country symbolizing the full citizenship and equal protection of all.

Charles B. Rangel

#9. My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron.

Edmund Burke

#10. The 'takings' clause of the Fifth Amendment is for conservatives what the equal protection clause of the 14th is for liberals.

Michael Kinsley

#11. What is so powerful here is that we have the first federal appellate court and it's a case coming out of Utah affirming in the strongest, clearest, boldest terms that the Constitution guarantees the freedom to marry and equal protection for all Americans and all means all, including gay couples.

Evan Wolfson

#12. The power granted the Attorney General to intervene in all equal-protection-of-the-law cases is extremely broad and dangerous. Choices made by the Attorney General could follow a political and selected pattern.

John Sparkman

#13. Money is speech. It's incongruous to say a multimillionaire can spend as much on his own campaign as he wants, but you can only give $2,300. His free speech rights are different from yours, thus violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. It's absurd.

Roger Stone

#14. What is the American dream? The American dream is one big tent. One big tent. And on that big tent you have four basic promises: equal protection under the law, equal opportunity, equal access, and fair share.

Jesse Jackson

#15. History has shown us that, on extraordinarily rare occasions, it becomes necessary for the federal government to intervene on behalf of individuals whose 14th Amendment rights to legal due process and equal protection may be violated by a state.

Michael K. Simpson

#16. There is no proportional representation requirement in the Equal Protection Clause.

Cass Sunstein

#17. The legal bias for special protection for women has begun to wreak havoc with the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection.

Warren Farrell

#18. It's time to recognize that under the equal protection clause of the United States [Constitution], same-sex couples should have the same rights as anybody else.

Barack Obama

#19. Equal protection under the law - for race, religion, gender or sexual orientation - should not be subject to the most popular sentiments of the day.

Cory Booker

#20. The bells will ring and the marriages will begin. And it's a great day in our state for equal protection under the law for all people.

Kamala Harris

#21. The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color. If both are not accorded the same protection, then it is not equal.

Lewis F. Powell Jr.

#22. Civil union is less than marriage. Marriage is a sacred and valued institution and ought to be afforded equal protection.

James McGreevey

#23. The language of the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws did not change between 1896 and 1954, and it would be very hard to say that the obvious facts on which 'Plessy' was based had changed.

David Souter

#24. It wouldn't be fair to say that conservatives cherish property the way liberals cherish equality. But it would be fair to say that the takings clause is the conservatives' recipe for judicial activism just as they say liberals have misused the equal protection clause.

Michael Kinsley

#25. Ultimately, I think the Equal Protection Clause does guarantee same-sex marriage in all fifty states.

Barack Obama

#26. The Constitution has a good share of deliberately open-ended guarantees, like rights to due process of law, equal protection of the law, and freedom from unreasonable searches.

David Souter

#27. All distinctions of birth or of rank have been abolished. All citizens, whether native or adopted, are placed upon terms of precise equality. All are entitled to equal rights and equal protection.

James K. Polk

#28. When the 14th Amendment, equal protection clause was enacted, the galleries in the Senate were segregated. Now we have integration.

Arlen Specter

#29. In the state of nature ... all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the law.

Baron De Montesquieu

#30. By our form of government, the Christian religion is the established religion; and all sects and denominations of Christians are placed upon the same equal footing, and are equally entitled to protection in their religious liberty.

Samuel Chase

#31. When one demands equal rights for women, one needs to assess in which areas women can work better than men, in which they can work like men, and in which they need protection and affirmative action for when they cannot work like men.

Pervez Musharraf

#32. A woman's best protection is a little money of her own.

Clare Boothe Luce

#33. All men have an equal right to the free development of their faculties; they have an equal right to the impartial protection of the state; but it is not true, it is against all the laws of reason and equity, it is against the eternal nature of things.

Victor Cousin

#34. Every individual of the community at large has an equal right to the protection of government.

Alexander Hamilton

#35. If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state-to relinquish its protection, and to refuse paying toward its support.

Herbert Spencer

#36. All men have equal rights to liberty, to their property, and to the protection of the laws

Voltaire

#37. We have to take our neighbours seriously, as people with an equal claim to protection, for whom we might be required, in moments of crisis, to face mortal danger. We do this because we believe ourselves to belong together in a shared home. The

Roger Scruton

#38. We all fight over what the label 'feminism' means but for me it's about empowerment. It's not about being more powerful than men - it's about having equal rights with protection, support, justice. It's about very basic things. It's not a badge like a fashion item.

Annie Lennox

#39. My greatest disappointment in all the projects I worked on during the White House years was the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment to be ratified ... Why all the controversy and why such difficulty in giving women the protection of the Constitution that should have been theirs long ago?

Rosalynn Carter

#40. The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. An equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages, is what every part is entitled to, and ought to enjoy.

Benjamin Franklin