> Bullshit. Of course you MUST protect minorities to be a democracy. If you don't protect a minority, how would the minority be able to exercise their voting rights?
By some definitions, a system is "democratic" if it reflects the will of the majority of the population. If the majority wish to deny certain groups the right to vote – maybe that's wrong, maybe it isn't, but so long as those groups are numerically a minority, it doesn't stop the system from reflecting the will of the majority of the population, and hence by those definitions isn't "non-democratic".
Even today, various groups are denied the right to vote – those beneath voting age, non-citizens, prisoners. Maybe those limitations on voting are right, maybe they are wrong – but since those groups are (collectively and individually) a numerical minority, denying them voting rights does not infringe on the principles of majoritarian democracy, if that denial is what the majority of the population wants. It may infringe on other values, but not majoritarian democratic ones.
> The situation that was remedied in Brown v. Board reduced the ability of black Americans to get educated, earn a decent living and participate fully in the democracy.
"Racism is wrong" is a different value from democracy. I agree it is wrong to discriminate against a group on the basis of their race, including by denying them voting rights – but, if the majority wants to do that, while that's a violation of anti-racist values, I don't see how that's a violation of democratic values. Anti-racist values and democratic values will contradict each other, whenever there is a pro-racist majority, and then you have to decide which of those values gets priority.
> For me, the protection of rights is the actual goal of democracy, and voting just a necessary means to this end.
For me, democracy is a good thing, but it is not the highest good. In some cases, it can be legitimate to put limits on democracy in order to protect other goods. If the majority of the population wants to commit a genocide, then it would be right to deny them their wish – it would be anti-democratic, but that's a case in which being anti-democratic is the right thing to do. If the military decided to launch a coup to prevent the genocide, I'd support that military coup, even though it would be anti-democratic, because an anti-genocide dictatorship is morally superior to a pro-genocide democracy.
> It's just that there are some principles that are sacrosanct and should be decided by experts on a very narrow basis.
Many other countries don't have entrenched constitutional rights like the US does. For example, I'm in Australia, and while abortion is legal nationwide, nobody in Australia has ever had a constitutional right to an abortion – we have legal abortion nationwide, because the people's elected representatives in each state voted to legalise it. In fact, the Constitution of Australia has no Bill of Rights, and while there are a handful of explicit provisions protecting various rights within its text, and a few more rights our High Court has "read into" it (e.g. the "implied right of political communication"), it contains far less extensive individual rights protections than the US Constitution does.
In the Commonwealth, there is a traditional legal doctrine, inherited from England, known as parliamentary sovereignty – Parliament has the power to make any laws whatsoever, even heinously wicked ones, and their wickedness does not make them legally invalid. The late 19th / early 20th century British jurist A. V. Dicey, in his influential textbook on English constitutional law, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1st ed 1885, 8th ed 1915) cited this example due to the moral philosopher Leslie Stephen: if Parliament wanted to order the murder of all blue-eyed babies, as morally heinous as that would be, it would be entirely legal and constitutional. Genocide is undoubtedly morally abhorrent, but in the English constitutional tradition, it is constitutional, and as far as that tradition goes, if a democratically elected Parliament votes for genocide, it would be democratic to carry the genocide out. Of course, the American traditions of constitutional law went in rather different directions – as far as I am aware, the English doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty was never received in the United States – but, maybe that's an example of how American and British understandings of "democracy" traditionally differ.