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OK first I'm going to reword the bolded part to see if I understand you correctly because I saw at least two different way that could have been taken. Are you saying, "The lower courts have ruled that denying same sex marriage violates the 14th admendment" or are you saying that "The violation of the 14th admendment comes from the lower courts ruling in favor of denying same sex marriages"?
The Prop 8 case was ruled on as a violation of the 14th Amendment and it was upheld by the Appeals Court. At least one of the DOMA challenges ruled it unconstitutional because of violating the 14th. Many of those states that have same sex marriage legal is because the courts ruled that banning it violated equal protection.
Not I am admittedly not up on all the various lower court rulings, but to the best of my recollection, there have been courts that have upheld bans and ones that have struck them down. Now maybe all the ones that have cited the 14th admendment have been ones to strike the bans down, I don't know. All I am saying is that one interpertation can be, as I have heard from anti-SSM proponents, that when marriage is defined legally as the union between a man and a woman, then that definition can be applied equally to all people. That is a homosexual man is just as equally able to get married to a woman as a straight man is. And I know the argument that a woman of any type is then not able to be married to a woman. But that doesn't fit the legal definition.
All those court rulings that said same sex marriage bans did not violate the EPC went off an assumption that man/woman marriage was traditional and what has been the accepted form of marriage. Which is an appeal to tradition that no court should be using, particularly when it comes to marriage. If it was right, then we should not have had a ruling making interracial marriage legal since it was not traditionally legal in those places with laws against it. And same sex partners can now legally marry in not only some of our own states and other countries around the world, but there is also evidence that they were allowed to marry in other places in history.
The entire point is that the legal definition of marriage when it is limited to only people of opposite sexes is what violates the 14th Amendment. Just as the legal definition limiting marriage to only couples of the same race violated the 14th Amendment.