Comment Re:Bullshit ... (Score 1) 219
By way of reference, I suggest you review the Founding Fathers' thoughts on slavery and women's right to vote and stuff.
I think this is the real point and real problem. The founding fathers were creating a consortium of states with a minimal federal government and were trying to protect the freedoms they felt were important. I am lucky to have benefited from a society built on them, but our people now would never agree with our founding fathers' beliefs.
- The people should be as well armed as the government
- The right to bear arms was obviously about making sure they would be able to successfully rebel against the government. It wasn't that scary a thought to them because they didn't see the government as being that big or critical. The idea of citizens having the rights to nuclear bombs would be inline with what they were setting up, but nobody (sane) wants that so we (the courts and lawmakers) ignore the intent and interpret arms as guns.
- Women weren't trustworthy and shouldn't be involved in running anything.
- Giving them a right to vote took 142 years. We prevented that right longer than we've granted it.
- Making someone a slave because of the circumstances they were born into was completely okay.
- For that matter, as much as we want to treat them as if they were ultimately great men, Jefferson had a child with his slave. Which, since he had the right to beat her, sell her or even kill her without fear of the law, cannot be considered other than rape.
That doesn't even touch on preventing the poor from voting.
The blunt fact is that the Constitution of the US was quite useful and has allowed the formation of a successful society with one of the highest standards of living in the world. And it is flawed since it was written by humans who were also flawed.
We should rewrite the Constitution from scratch around the beliefs we actually care about. We can't because we can't agree about anything and we'd have another civil war if we even tried. We can't even get anywhere near the point of being able to amend it. I for one wouldn't trust either party's representatives currently in power to do something nearly as successful for so long.
The only way we could fix it would be to do the debate and drafting without informing the public. When something is done in secret, you can make deals, agree to give up one thing in order to get something you feel is more important. Maybe we'd see the right to a free press succeed because the right to marry someone of the same sex would get dropped. Can you imagine the uproar if that was a debate in the public eye? There would be riots. Ultimately I think that's why treaties are handled in secret; a public debate would cause so much fighting it would do more harm than good.