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Demeaning of the Constitution
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
Demeaning of the Constitutionby Roderick T. Beaman The constitutional debate has raged for years, now. There are the original intent people on one side who maintain that we should only interpret the Constitution to mean what The Founding Fathers meant. On the other side are the proponents of a living document who maintain that the Constitution has to change with the times. Of course, it always seems to be only themselves whom they entrust to determine the way it's supposed to change.The Constitution was a contract between thirteen independent nation-states. A contract is a prior agreement between parties. It's not elastic. Lawyers may argue over the exact meaning of a document but through the words themselves. They'll argue for hours sometimes over the placement of a comma but their goal is always to discover the original intent of the parties. Sometimes the parties will sue to dissolve the agreement but the meaning of the contract remains and is the guideline for all subsequent decisions. Some of the Original Intent school have taken to citing The Federalist Papers as the best guide to interpreting the Constitution. The Living Documenters counter that most of The Federalist Papers were written to persuade reluctant states, especially New York, to ratify. Therefore, it's invalid to use The Federalist Papers to discover the original intent of the framers. Further, they state that there is no real way to determine the original intent of the Founding Fathers, because there were no minutes of the meetings of the convention (I hasten to add that I have no knowledge as to the validity of that statement but for my purposes, it's moot whether it is or not). As I thought about these arguments, I realized that there was one immutable about the document - the words that were used. The Constitution was written in straightforward eighteenth century English that has changed very little in the intervening twenty-one decades. No one can dispute that there were many drafts before the delegates settled on what they endorsed. Surely there were heated debates as to the exact wording. The words they chose must have meant something, so let's look at the final draft and the words they chose. (For the purposes of this article, I used the word count function in my word processor. I confined this study to the original constitution plus the first ten amendments, called The Bill of Rights.) The words state or states appear 81 times in the Constitution other than in the context of the United States or the United States of America. They appear joined with the word, foreign, as in foreign states, twice. The word, foreign, itself appears four times. Congress or some such term appears 31 times. Legislatures or state legislatures appears fifteen times. What may we infer from this? It should be obvious that they differentiated the legislatures and congress. Also, they used the modifier, foreign, to signify another country as opposed to the American states themselves. They did not use the term foreign nation or foreign country but rather foreign state. It is of vital importance to mull that over. They must have equated state with nation or country. In other words, there were states that were independent entities, whether foreign or domestic. It was the free, sovereign and independent individual states that created the entity called the United States of America. That entity, the United States of America, is supposed the hand servant of the states, and not the other way around. There is no other conclusion possible. Now let's look at the context of these various words of the Constitution. The First Amendment states, 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;...' This prohibition doesn't mention the states nor even the legislatures. Now, it's odd how everyone talks about the separation of church and state doctrine but in fact, the phrase doesn't appear in the Constitution. There is only a prohibition against congress establishing a religion. I am forced to a conclusion that I don't particularly like. The states are permitted to establish a religion if they like or to enact a similar amendment for their own citizens. In addition, the First Amendment doesn't even prevent the states from prohibiting the free exercise of a particular religion. The Amendment only prohibits congress from doing it. This conclusion makes me shudder because my own Catholicism was a distinctly minority religion at the time. By my own analysis, a state could have prohibited my religion. Only the federal government was prevented from doing it. A look at the language used in the other amendments is also instructive. All of the remaining amendments are inclusive, broad in their language and not narrowly drawn as the First. They were obviously meant to apply everywhere in the country. Over the years, The American Civil Liberties Union, a misnomer if there ever was one, has been in the forefront of the assault on religion in government places. The organization has distorted the First Amendment beyond recognition and driven anything that even remotely smacks of God or religion out of schools, courts and public places. All leftists must do this. They are compelled to do it for complicated reasons.They have been especially aggressive with respect to the Catholic Church and the reasons are derivatively apparent. The Catholic Church with its system of schools, is the most obvious example of God, religion and Christianity in Western Civilization. School bus service, textbooks, borrowed teachers and others have been challenged in the courts by the ACLU. The organization has even sued to strip the Church of its tax-exempt status because of its political action against abortion. (As if the ACLU is not a political entity.) They have no chance of triumphing over God and religion if they do not destroy the Catholic Church in American society or reducing it to irrelevancy. Anti-Catholicism is liberalism's anti-Semitism. Now consider the Second Amendment. It reads, 'A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, (there's that word again with its dual meaning) the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed'. The working of that is emphatic and inclusive. There is no room for interpretation as to whether it refers to the federal, state or local governments. It means all governments in the entire polity of the United States of America. Yet where is the selfsame ACLU on this matter? You would think that after the distortions and contortions of the First Amendment to drive God out of schools, that it would fight tooth and nail against any restriction of any kind of firearm possession. Think again. The ACLU has endorsed gun control on the basis of the very first phrase, 'A well regulated militia'. It takes the position, that militias, such as the National Guard, should possess the firearms and control their distribution to the people. They totally ignore the last part of the amendment which says, '...the right of the PEOPLE, to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.' In juxtaposition with its position on the First Amendment, you have to hand it to them for chutzpah. These arguments are further buttressed by reading the remaining eight amendments of the Bill of Rights. All are written in inclusive, broadly drawn language. Not one mentions congress. But why would they take such logically, diametrically opposite approaches - incredibly elastic on the one hand yet retracting on the other? The answer lies in its history. Most of the founders of the ACLU, were communists. As communism gained adherents in America in the 1920s, they gathered together to find ways to shield themselves from prosecution. One method they explored was the use of the Constitution. It was diabolically clever of them to use the very document whose principles they were trying to destroy to protect them while they were doing it. The organization had many successes and many of the plotters avoided jail time through crafty invocations of the Fifth Amendment and other parts of the Constitution. In an interesting epilogue, Roger Baldwin, one of the founders, later endorsed Senator Joseph McCarthy's hearings into communist infiltration of the federal government. Today, the ACLU is no longer infested to the same degree that it once was by communists but its Leftist orientation remains.The ACLU can not shake its communist legacy. At the soul of the organization is the sympathy that central economic planning, even to the extent of communism, is preferable to economic liberty. Its members may not say that and many may not even realize it but that is the upshot of their politics. All totalitarian governments disarm the populace when they takeover. This is the only possible explanation for the ACLU's positions. There is no doubt that many, if not most, members of the ACLU today, are not communists. Also undoubtedly, there are some who are. The Constitution is not only a document that addresses political freedom but also economic. Economic liberty is at the very heart of it. Much of the impetus behind our fight for independence hinged on economic liberty. Yet, can anyone name the last time the ACLU brought suit over economic liberty? I can't name a single instance. It has often been observed that economic liberty leads to political liberty and the loss of economic liberty is the precursor to political dictatorship. We are now seeing our political liberties straightjacketed. Of course, for years, we have had increasing economic intervention in all phases of the economy. The loss of political freedom was inevitable. Libertarians must be warned of the danger the ACLU and other groups like them pose to our ideas of liberty and our agenda. The Constitution means no less but no more than exactly what it says. At its heart, is the spirit of economic as well as political liberty. There are times when we will have cause to ally with them but we cannot be blinded to their true goals. They have little interest in economic liberty and limited government. Consequently, ultimately, have no interest in political liberty. When government can influence or even destroy entire industries with regulations and laws, political freedom is meaningless or will become meaningless, shortly.This nation was founded upon the precept of a higher authority to whom we are all responsible and from whom our rights are derived. Those who demur are free to do so but if they find it so offensive to be reminded of it, they should do the only intellectually honest thing. Leave for another or even establish another country founded upon principles which would be more their own liking. Economic, as well as political liberty and human dignity derived from God are the cornerstones of this nation. The Constitution must be enforced as written. It as never meant to allow what has become of the federal government. The Founding Fathers would be appalled and would probably want just about every federal official, from the president on down, hanged.Roderick T. Beaman was born in New York City in 1944. He majored in mathematics at New York University where he fell in with the wrong crowd and became a pre-med. He is a board certified osteopathic family physician in Providence, Rhode Island but around the age of 50 realized that his true calling was to be a writer, musician or actor. He is hoping to accomplish a career change and is proudest of being a published poet, has composed one blues song and written a politically incorrect novel. You can reach him at TheFreedomBeam@aol.com. http://www.libertyforall.net/2002/archive/demeaning.html
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