9mm, you just jumped down a deep legal and historical rabbit hole
Modern interpretation breaks that section of the 14A into two parts:
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States
This is called the "privileges or immunities" clause.
nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
This is called the "due process" clause.
Now, the original intent of the 14A was to extend the protections of the Bill of Rights to everyone. You'd have the same rights in New Jersey that you do in Utah. Simple, right?
Nope. We had a bit of a war over the matter. The Union won, and the Confederacy lost. The secessionist states had to agree to ratify the 13th-15th Amendments to gain readmittance to the union. Lots of folks were resentful.
One of the tenets of the 14A directly conflicted with the Supreme Court's decision in
Scott v. Sandford, and they were none too pleased. Several of those Justices were still on the bench during Reconstruction, and they set to gutting the 14A whenever possible.
The 1873
Slaughterhouse Cases decision is worth reading on the matter. The privileges or immunities clause was pretty much rendered moot, a pattern that continued through the
Cruikshank decision.
The
Cruikshank was a response to a bloody injustice, and the Court's decision was an equally repellent injustice. But it stuck. It wouldn't be until the late 1930's that Hugo Black started pushing the idea of
incorporation. He argued that the privileges or immunities clause did just what it said, but the rest of the Court refused (and still refuses) to acknowledge that.
(This was one of Gura's pivotal arguments in
McDonald, and I'm very disappointed that Scalia dismissed it so quickly in the orals.)
Having failed on the PorI front, the Court would later decide that the due process clause did allow for "incorporating" certain rights against the states. 1st Amendment rights were the first to be granted protection, and others would follow in the next couple of decades.
The problem with incorporation, however, is that it is a patchwork approach to a problem that already has a clear solution in sight. If we accept the PorI clause as written, the Bill of Rights is applied to the states. Easy, right?
With incorporation, we have to wait until someone's suitably aggrieved (and they have the money, clout, luck and time to get the matter before the court) on a specific right. Then there's a chance that right, and only that right, gets incorporated. That's what we got in
McDonald. I felt it was half a win, but it was still a win when we sorely needed one.
