I suppose there will always be some malcontents who will say that of every court action, no matter how reasonable, but realistically, there would be much less justification for it than there is now. If you take an honest look at federal court decisions that rely on that one clause in the Constitution, there is virtually no consistency to them. And combined with the equal-protection clause, they can rule almost literally any way their personal preferences take them - even when there is no offending law to begin with, such as the order "desegregating" Boston's public schools, or that real doosie in St. Louis where the federal judge ordered taxes raised on surrounding communities to pay for supposedly disadvantaged inner-city public schools.
And I don't entirely blame the judges; the culture creates the problem, too. Pick just about any high-court ruling on any subject, and observe the criticism or praise that comes from pundits: Virtually nowhere do you see the decision evaluated on the basis of whether or not the writer thinks it's a valid reading of the law; it is only evaluated on the basis of whether or not the writer thinks the ruling would make good policy, so they're outright encouraging judges to act as priestly lawgivers. This is true even of conservatives. Just recently someone here on FR pinged me to a petition to get the supreme court to overturn Roe vs. Wade, which I refused to sign - not because I agree with the ruling (I very much don't, in case you hadn't guessed), but because the petition didn't mention a single word about the Constitution anywhere. All it talked about was how evil abortion is, which I agree it is, but it's not the job of the judges to make that determination. Their only job is to determine what the law says, and leave legislatures and voters to decide what it should say.
And incidentally, what I would regard as a beneficial result of applying the 14th amendment properly (aside from restoring some integrity to the judicial process) would be that states would once again become the formidable checks on federal power that they were intended to be. It's not that I think it would be a good thing for them to start restricting free speech and gun ownership, but that it definitely would be a good thing if they didn't have some busybody second-guessing their laws and policies all the time. The states have tended to allow themselves to become emasculated in recent decades in the shadow of Washington, and it's really long past time for them to get their guts back. I think that even if it does result in some occasional abuses of power by the states, the overall result will be enhanced liberty for the entire country.
You're absolutely right. If the Boy Scout case had been decided based upon your interpretation of the due process clause, most local news programs would have begun their broadcast with something along the lines of "The Supreme Court ruled today that the Boy Scouts of America must accept gay scout leaders." Now, that would literally be correct (at least in the state of New Jersey), but the public would be left with the impression that the Supreme Court just sort of decided on its own that it would be a good idea to have gay scout leaders. And the call buttons at talk radio shows would light up like Christmas trees. Unless someone read down to maybe the tenth paragraph of a major newspaper, he/she might never know that it involved an example of judicial restraint rather than one of judicial activism.
It's not that I think it would be a good thing for them to start restricting free speech and gun ownership, but that it definitely would be a good thing if they didn't have some busybody second-guessing their laws and policies all the time.
I think that for most people who feel that the Fourteenth Amendment has been overused, the real concern is the federalism issue rather than the issue of legislative vs. judicial powers. Let me give you an example. A lot of people were very angry when the Supreme Court began using the equal protection clause to strike down state laws which expressly discriminated between people on the basis of race. They were angry at the Supreme Court for "acting like a mini-legislature." But whenever the Congress uses Section 5 of the amendment to pass legislation on the basis of the equal protection clause, many of the same people who had resented the Supreme Court's involvement (when it was acting alone) then turn around and insist that the Supreme Court become involved by declaring the act of Congress unconstitutional. So it seems to me that these people are less concerned about the Supreme Court getting involved than they are about any branch of the Federal government getting involved. A lot of folks just have a difficult time coming to terms with the fact that, by anyone's interpretation, the Fourteenth Amendment did involve an enlargement of the central government's powers at the expense of the states.