In a healthy civil society legally enshrined rights are less important because you can trust that everybody's freedom will be maximized, at least to a first-order approximation. In unhealthy societies legal rights are often cold comfort.
I take slight issue with that - for example, what prohibition on males was there when women were given the right to vote? I suppose one could argue the male vote was diluted but realistically no pain would be felt.
I say this because oftentimes for social services arguments, conservatives will ask me "well who's gonna pay for it," which I can often answer with "literally nobody. You are generating property value for yourself by housing homeless / increasing the value of your currency by educating disenfranchised youth / whatever."
In college a professor told us "You can't grant a right without taking one away." In recent decades, the US trend seems to have been toward more individual rights and fewer community/state rights.