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kennywinker

Abortion also has a deep historical precedent. People have been doing them for at least a thousand years.

Gay marriage has existed for as long as marriage has, it’s just best documented when it involves emperors.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_same-sex_marriag...

But you know what doesn’t have a long historical precedence? Automatic weapons, or protecting money as speech.

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The "it wasn't invented at the time they wrote the Constitution, so the Constitution doesn't apply to it" argument has been debunked long ago. Otherwise, freedom of speech would only apply to parchment and quill pens. The whole point of a court is to interpret the Constitution with new facts and situations that arise.

"The whole point of a court is to interpret the Constitution with new facts and situations that arise."

You're describing the "living constitution"[1] view, which has not been the dominant position among Supreme Court justices for some time.

Now they're all "strict constructionists"[2], who think the opposite of what you describe: that the constitution should be interpreted just as it was written.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Constitution

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_constructionism

Originalism was rejected by the court for the longest time, but we have since appointed new judges to the court who don't reject those arguments. They used originalist arguments to overturn the NYC gun ban yesterday.

Money has been used for speech since the invention of money.

I’ll grant you automatic weapons though

Semi automatic

Just to be clear, no SCOTUS case has yet stated that citizens are entitled to own fully automatic firearms, and it seems to me exceedingly unlikely that they would. Heller talks about how to decide what kinds of firearms can be prohibited, and strongly indicates that you can't ban 9mm handguns because they are the most popular firearm for self-defense and so on. It's hard to see how one can extend Heller and this case to say that you cannot prohibit fully automatic firearms.

The constitution was written in 1787. Guns were all muzzle loaded at that time. The automatic/semi-automatic distinction is meaningless to the constitution. Why would it draw a line at automatic and not at post 1820 percussion cap weapons?

> Abortion also has a deep historical precedent.

It has, but not as a right. The Hippocratic oath specifically bans it:

> Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion.

— Hippocratic Oath (AD 275, or earlier)

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