Equality is, of course, central to everything on this website. See, for example, my essay on Equal Justice, or Isonomia. Yet I am composing this essay to address aspects not addressed elsewhere.
As context, I note that one crucial aspect has to do with the fact that, in the U.S. Constitution, the Fourteenth Amendment's key Section 1 guarantees have been distorted, maimed, arguably gutted. That section's guarantee of "equal protection of the laws" appears third, after the second clause forbidding any State to "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"; but the first and most general guarantee of Section 1 provides crucial context for both: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States." This crucial first clause was essentially cut out of the Constitution in 1873.
In terms of basic "natural rights" theory, so central to this country's founding, that first guarantee should "inform" or contextualize the second, as the second "informs" the third; the three must be read together, interpreted together, and enforced together, else — as has happened since 1873 — the second and third, bereft of the first, must carry too heavy a jurisprudential burden