Even the name "Founding Fathers" and the way it's thrown around seems quite bizarre for a democracy. It's the people, and the will of the people, that should be respected, not what some long gone luminaries said.
"those who may be unfamiliar: look into the passing of the USA P.A.T.R.I.O.T Act passed shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a bill of over 2000 pages which was rushed through congress in span of a few days from finalization to ratification under the prosumtion of necessity to provide the tools to combat terrorism. It stripped away many powers of the judicial branch to provide oversight, and provisions intended to be 'temporary' have been continually extended by presidents (executive branch) on both sides of the aisle since."
It's a writ small version of the situation that you see with, e.g. Bangladesh. The voting populace there is very conservative, and despite the constitution creating a secular republic, voters have Islamized the country since then. A few years ago, there was a touchy situation where there was concern an interim military caretaker government would not hand back power to the civilian government once elections were conducted. People like my parents (who immigrated to the U.S. from there) who think secular democracy is really important, kind of supported an undemocratic military intervention that might have the effect of protecting it.
WTF.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-wh...
>Approval of black-white marriage is higher among younger Americans, and lowest among those 65 and older
I wasn't sure I'd heard him correctly and was about to cross the street so I did that and then looked at the piece of paper, expecting maybe some some religious admonition. Instead it was a fake legal document saying I'd been identified as a 'race traitor.'
Speech like this is arguably not constitutionally protected by the first amendment, despite popular misconceptions to the contrary. But breaches of the peace have to be enforced by the police; there is no private right of action. This leads to obvious problems where ethnic minorities or members of other protected classes are subject to abuse and local authorities are unsympathetic, a tension reflected in the state/federal legal divide.
It's because to organize a huge number of people, one must create commonalities among them. Any society must have core beliefs, myths, touchstones, and practices, to keep it unified and keep people cooperating and trusting each other.
The founding fathers, their writings and ideals, form the civil religion that makes a rich black Texan Catholic have some reason to trust a poor white Washingtonian atheist. Even though they may be different in so many ways, they at least have this one thing in common, which separates them together from the wider world of Others.
To cooperate properly, humans need this kind of tribal identity correspondence, and an Other to separate themselves from. It's in-built tribal psychology.
Even if those texts prescribe practices are sometimes sub-optimal in outcome, without them the whole society falls apart pretty quickly due to infighting and unsolvable differences in values and identities.
So the value in the texts is not just policy wisdom - it is simply that they are the thing everyone believes in.
This is what's happening now, in fact - a fetish for destroying normative beliefs means people more and more have nothing in common. People just didn't understand the purpose those beliefs had in the first place. They threw them away and now here we are.
(None of this is to say that the content of the texts is totally irrelevant - a society organized around the writings of the founding fathers is obviously going to be different than a society organized around the writings of Confucius, or the texts of Islam. It just means the content isn't the only reason we hold onto these texts).
It's not the only law we interpret this way, considering the intent of the people who created it; courts do the same with laws passed by Congress.
But in public discourse, it's not treated as a mere law, something humans created, and they could toss if they like, but as some kind of holy scripture given by some wise old men.
Either 27 or 18, depending on whether you count the simultaneous ratification of the first 10 amendments as one use of the Amendment process or 10 separate, parallel uses.
The only way I can remotely see that gets to 17 is if you count 1-10 and 27 as one use of the Amendment process since they were submitted together, even though 27 was ratified 200 years and a few months after 1-10.
I had a funny feeling I was going to learn something when I posted my comment :)
His book, "On Constitutional Disobedience", is now available. I read it, but the piece captures the main idea.
I personally think the Republic is far overdue for a refounding, and strongly suspect that the founders of the existing one would have heartily agreed ;-)
My respect for these men is more about their arguably humanistic, Enlightenment-oriented thoughts, knowledge, and goals, which they set down with the seeming best of intents in the hope of crafting a land and a government better than any the world had seen up until then.
Was their dream perfect, or implemented perfectly? No, perhaps not - they were men of their age, and human - with all the faults and foibles that entails. However, even given these limitations, one can't deny that they did a remarkable job.
Personally, I feel that they did a better job than virtually any of our current politicians here in the US could (or would) do today. Hell, the fact that they argued and were at odds over many of the things in our Constitution, yet had the wisdom and humbleness to discuss, argue, compromise, and concede as adults to craft this document, puts them far ahead of most of our representatives today, IMHO.
> It's the people, and the will of the people, that should be respected, not what some long gone luminaries said.
These "long gone luminaries" would be appalled at our current situation. They expected that the populace would be educated - not to a base level, but to an "Enlightenment level" - each of us capable of rational discussion, discourse, and understanding of virtually all topics of our day. Where we were limited, we would have the temerity to defer to another with better understanding, in the hope of becoming more educated ourselves. We would not rely upon some mystical being who may not even be there (most of them were Deists), but instead rely upon ourselves and the guidance of history to correct our problems as best as we could. We would embrace and not eschew Science and its understandings, because in that knowledge we could find answers.
Instead, today, the majority of the populace is an apathetic mass on virtually everything; the remainder is mostly divided, angry, and poorly educated. Beyond that is a very small percentage of the people - still divided - making the decisions for the majority; the scary thing is, that even among this small percentage of the population, there is still a great amount who are uneducated, superstitious and bigoted (or worse - educated, machiavellian, and bigoted), and they seeming loathe - if not outright irrationally hate - societal and scientific progress.
This country will fall apart unless we get our act together. I just don't see this happening in a way that ultimately matters - whereby the uneducated and/or apathetic portions of our society understand the importance of bettering their minds and engaging (even if it is just having an informed opinion based on facts) in the governmental sphere of their lives, so that the discussions that need to happen do happen, and the divisions are made smaller.
Should the will of the people be respected? Certainly - when it is just and fair. Right now, for a lot of people, it seems like the will is "eye-for-an-eye" and "mob mentality" (and apparently, they are ok with decades long solitary confinement for people who are innocent, just because they look different or think differently). Such ideas, attitudes and wills I cannot respect.
Why would they have had these lovely expectations, given that they (the founders) constituted a small minority in the colonies and were constructing a government for a majority population that was basically uneducated? Free public education as a movement remained decades in the future. The founders were not stupid or delusional, and they knew their neighbors, and they had no expectation that "the populace would be educated".