Reply #17: why would anyone think the US Bill of Rights is necessary? [View All]

[iverglas]

I ask because OBVIOUSLY the people who wrote your constitution did NOT, at one time, think that it was necessary.

Those things are called "amendments", no?

Your founders & framers didn't seem to have too much trouble with the idea that if a thing wasn't as good as it could be, it oughta be amended.

Why would anyone bind themselves and their children's futures to a bunch of words that the guys who wrote them in the first place had managed to leave out the first time around and only added as an afterthought??

I'm not saying there is anything WRONG with any of them -- I'm just saying THEY ARE NOT WRIT IN STONE.

I'm saying, and saying it quite confidently, that your founders & framers really did not think that they had produced perfection, the peak of human achievement, when they wrote your constitution and its early amendments.

They wrote what they believed to be the best blueprint for the project they were embarking on -- the creation of a society of free, happy people. Do you imagine that THEY thought that the result of what they were doing would be a bunch of people, over 200 years later, bickering and nattering about what those commas they used meant??

Man, I sure do doubt it. I don't think that they imagined that anyone else would feel more constrained by their choices and words than they themselves had felt by others' before them. I think they'd regard you as just as entitled to make your own rules and choose your own priorities as they felt that they were. I would think that they'd be the first to acknowledge that new circumstances call for fresh ideas.

I think they'd be disappointed as all hell if they were to read some of the things that get said here, and think some people to be evil idiots, using their words to betray their actual intentions and hopes.

I just don't think that they were so anti-modern as to believe that they had achieved the end state of human existence, written the final set of rules for human behaviour, and that human history could now end and no one else must ever think for themselves or take their own destiny in hand. I really just don't. But that's just me.



I've got rights that you don't have, under my constitution. How can that be? If your constitution is a complete and perfect set of stuff and can't be tampered with, how could anyone have added to it? What would happen to mine if it were tampered with, and the stuff that I have that you don't were taken out of it?

You've got that second amendment thingy that I don't have any counterpart of. And still my constitutional rights have managed not to fall flat, and are doing just fine, thank you. If a constitutional bill of rights needs a "right to bear arms" in it, how can that be?

Sorry ... I shouldn't have tried to pretend that there are other proven ways of doing things in this world besides what your founders & framers may have dreamt up ... just got carried away; I'll try to restrain myself next time.

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