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How We Learned to Love the Bill of Rights

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Re: How We Learned to Love the Bill of Rights

#31

Post by freddie_mercury »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #4

This article is critical of the "cult" of the bill of rights. But look at China the other day and how their constitution was changed on a whim. Look at Russia which has Putin despite of a fairly modern and standard constitution. Constitutions and laws are mere pieces of paper until the society within which they live endow them with sacred status. Without the "cult" and the moral indignation at violations surely civil…

> If the BoR didn't have the same nearly religious status one of those attacks would have succeeded by now.

I don't think this follows at all from the article. After all, one of the main points is that there WASN'T a cult until the 1940s...yet those rights were able to stand for 160 years without a religious status supporting them.

Your argument that the Bill of Rights had a religious status for all 200+ years of its history seems a direct contradiction of one of the book's central claims and I don't see that you've presented any arguments in support of your counter-claim.

If the Bill of Rights didn't have religious status for those 200+ years then your subsequent claim that the religious status is a necessary part of keeping it intact would seem to wither.

Re: How We Learned to Love the Bill of Rights

#32

Post by notMick »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #15
exabrial wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On their defense, people mean well, but 'the road to hell did paved with good intentions' as they say. 1st Amendment is being attacked by liberals, with pronoun laws, hate speech regulations, equal opportunity laws, forced cake baking, many other things. The 2nd is also being attacked from a variety of ways by liberals, which as said before, is well intentioned, but ultimately destructive. Thank goodness the 3rd isn'…

The first is being attacked by conservatives. Attacking the Bill of Rights isn't exclusive to one end of the political spectrum.

Seriously? The only people keeping the first amendment there are the conservatives!

The left are trying to remove it with their various 'hate speech' laws (already done in many countries, say the 'wrong thing' on Facebook in the UK and you have the police coming to arrest you in hours) which can be applied to anything the left simply don't want you to say - and silencing you is fundamental to far left ideology.

Re: How We Learned to Love the Bill of Rights

#33

Post by nraynaud »

arwhatever wrote: post #30
skookumchuck wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like all of the amendments. I'm not an NRA member, but the idea of repealing the 2nd Amendment, or worse, interpreting it out of existence has bothered me in ways I couldn't quite put my finger on. I finally realized what it was. If we decide one of the rights is "archaic", "obsolete", "insane", or any of the epithets routinely leveled at it, we set a terrible precedent. How long will it be before the rest fall w…

Scott Greenfield covered your exact point pretty well over at his "Simple Justice" law blog https://blog.simplejustice.us/2015/10/06/ten-favs-from-the-b...

This amendment feels so random, tho. Why firearms and not other weapons? Why not general means of defense?

There are also consistency issues, the prohibition was an amendment, what made that thing negociable?

Other fundamental rules are completely inconsistent like being 21 to drink while the majority is 18.

Re: How We Learned to Love the Bill of Rights

#34

Post by mindslight »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #10
flossball wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Supreme Court loves to ignore the ninth. Somehow the fourth amendment is about convenience now? If we aren't detained or delayed, the government can copy, search, and scan anything they want. It appears the third now too is gone and the government can do what it wants on your land without permission or compensation.

It appears the third now too is gone and the government can do what it wants on your land without permission or compensation. I'm pretty sure that the United States government has not been forcing anyone to house soldiers. https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/amen...

Mitchell vs City of Henderson.

They've all been pwnt in one way or another.

Re: How We Learned to Love the Bill of Rights

#35

Post by protomyth »

exabrial wrote: post #11
skookumchuck wrote: post #2

Unfortunately, pretty much all of the BoR is regularly under attack. Those rights have to be constantly reaffirmed.

On their defense, people mean well, but 'the road to hell did paved with good intentions' as they say. 1st Amendment is being attacked by liberals, with pronoun laws, hate speech regulations, equal opportunity laws, forced cake baking, many other things. The 2nd is also being attacked from a variety of ways by liberals, which as said before, is well intentioned, but ultimately destructive. Thank goodness the 3rd isn'…

Thank goodness the 3rd isn't an issue!

There is an old Dr Dobbs article that mentions that the 3rd might be the key to keeping the government from installing mandatory software on our computers. A stretch, but don’t forget the intent of that amendment.

Re: How We Learned to Love the Bill of Rights

#36

Post by rypskar »

nraynaud wrote: post #24
Meekro wrote: post #6

Reading the Soviet Bill of Rights is pretty instructive because it'll show you how much such a thing is worth on its own. Here is just a subset of the rights guaranteed by the USSR Constitution: speech; press; religion (both to profess and refuse to profess); assembly (including a specific right to demonstrate); participation in lawmaking; inviolability of the person (from warrantless arrest) and of the home (from un…

Remember that the bill of rights didn’t prevent slavery. There is a common trick for enlightened democracies: you can always call some groups of people non-citizens and do horrible stuff to them. The trick is as old as democracy, the Greeks were doing it already. (Modern day America has an entire manual to strip citizenship from people, don’t believe you’re like a native just because you got a piece of paper and a fl…

Try to look up how the concept of human "race" was made to support the right to have slaves. Is strange how some countries have taken it even longer by siding "race" and ethnicity

Re: How We Learned to Love the Bill of Rights

#37

Post by skookumchuck »

arwhatever wrote: post #30
skookumchuck wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like all of the amendments. I'm not an NRA member, but the idea of repealing the 2nd Amendment, or worse, interpreting it out of existence has bothered me in ways I couldn't quite put my finger on. I finally realized what it was. If we decide one of the rights is "archaic", "obsolete", "insane", or any of the epithets routinely leveled at it, we set a terrible precedent. How long will it be before the rest fall w…

Scott Greenfield covered your exact point pretty well over at his "Simple Justice" law blog https://blog.simplejustice.us/2015/10/06/ten-favs-from-the-b...

Glad to see my opinion is shared, and he writes a lot better than I do, too!

Re: How We Learned to Love the Bill of Rights

#38

Post by IIAOPSW »

nraynaud wrote: post #33
arwhatever wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scott Greenfield covered your exact point pretty well over at his "Simple Justice" law blog https://blog.simplejustice.us/2015/10/06/ten-favs-from-the-b...

This amendment feels so random, tho. Why firearms and not other weapons? Why not general means of defense? There are also consistency issues, the prohibition was an amendment, what made that thing negociable? Other fundamental rules are completely inconsistent like being 21 to drink while the majority is 18.

>This amendment feels so random, tho. Why firearms and not other weapons?

But it does cover other weapons. You can own as my knives as you want. The exact text is "the right to keep and bear arms". Firearms isn't specified.

>prohibition was an amendment, what made that thing negociable?

It wasn't negotiable. There was another amendment to repeal it.

>Other fundamental rules are completely inconsistent like being 21 to drink while the majority is 18.

While true this is inconsistent, it isn't actually in the constitution. In theory states can set drinking and majority age as high and low as they want.

Re: How We Learned to Love the Bill of Rights

#39

Post by aaronbrethorst »

mindslight wrote: post #34
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears the third now too is gone and the government can do what it wants on your land without permission or compensation. I'm pretty sure that the United States government has not been forcing anyone to house soldiers. https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/amen...

Mitchell vs City of Henderson. They've all been pwnt in one way or another.

The Mitchells lost their case—at least on the third amendment claims.

Re: How We Learned to Love the Bill of Rights

#40

Post by kelnos »

skookumchuck wrote: post #22
exabrial wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On their defense, people mean well, but 'the road to hell did paved with good intentions' as they say. 1st Amendment is being attacked by liberals, with pronoun laws, hate speech regulations, equal opportunity laws, forced cake baking, many other things. The 2nd is also being attacked from a variety of ways by liberals, which as said before, is well intentioned, but ultimately destructive. Thank goodness the 3rd isn'…

> I like all of the amendments. I'm not an NRA member, but the idea of repealing the 2nd Amendment, or worse, interpreting it out of existence has bothered me in ways I couldn't quite put my finger on. I finally realized what it was. If we decide one of the rights is "archaic", "obsolete", "insane", or any of the epithets routinely leveled at it, we set a terrible precedent. How long will it be before the rest fall w…

I would absolutely be in favor of a repeal of the 2nd Amendment, and I would be very afraid to see the right to bear arms be legislated out of existence (without a repeal) because of the precedent that would set regarding not just the rest of the Bill of Rights, or the rest of the Amendments, but the entire Constitution itself.

I'm not talking about the 2nd being inconvenient. I'm talking about it being a mistake. Just like prohibition was. Just because we might collectively decide that giving people the right to arm themselves in ridiculous ways was a mistake, it doesn't follow that we're obviously going to decide that freedom of speech was a mistake, too. I'm absolutely not buying a slippery-slope argument here; that's just a fancy way of saying "I don't want positive change because I'm afraid of negative change as well".

The Bill of Rights is not some magical thing. Amendments are simply late additions to the Constitution. They are a part of the constitution. Suggesting that we shouldn't repeal an Amendment is suggesting that the Constitution's own amendment process should be tossed aside as invalid.

> We need to stand for all the BoR. Not whatever is convenient.

No, we don't. We need to stand for what makes sense for our society. "Convenience" has nothing to do with it.

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