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 unlawful entry or search); privacy of all correspondence (including phone conversations); right to challenge actions of government officials and bodies in court; right to a job; work week limited to 40 hours; free medical care; welfare payments in old age, sickness, or disability; free housing; free education; academic freedom for scientists.
It's a very good list, and what I listed above isn't even half of it [1]. Precisely none of those were actually respected by the government. Having a Bill of Rights is great, but having a tradition of limited government, checks and balances, and rule of law is what gives those guarantees any weight.
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 flag, the beast might turn against you)
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
Note that the rights in the Soviet Constitution have an important explicit limitation in Article 39: “Enjoyment by citizens of their rights and freedoms must not be to the detriment of the interests of society or the state, or infringe the rights of other citizens.”
This sort of thing is common in well run democratic countries too. European constitutions are full of provisions that say "Such and such a right is inviolable, except when it's not". Or "except when it is violated according to the law".
And it works! That's because (in recent decades) the political reality in Western Europe has been basically in favour of democracy in freedom -- and so they limited basic rights only in corner cases like Holocaust denial. Constitutional texts can help people focus on what is needed for democracy and freedom (and US the Bill of Rights does a good job of this), but what really counts is how people live out the text, rather than the mechanics explicit in the text.
Still, the fact that these exceptions exist is a clear sign that the authors of the document did not see these as rights at all, but rather revocable privileges. In practical terms, you don't need a written constitution to uphold rights, and having one does not guarantee that rights are upheld—but if you're going to go to the trouble of defining rights in a written constitution, you shouldn't include an insidious "escape hatch" which undermines those rights by claiming that they can legitimately be infringed "for a good cause". Rights, as opposed to privileges, are unconditional and cannot legitimately be infringed under any circumstance.
This is what scares me about the current attitude (nationally) towards gun control. The right to bear arms is a basic civil right, unambiguously encoded in the Bill of Rights alongside speech, assembly, religion, due process, etc. Throughout history, taking away weapons has always been an early step down the slippery slope to totalitarianism and stripping the populous of their other rights. Just because it's unlikely to happen here -- that we think it can't happen here -- doesn't mean it will not. That's what everyone in all of history has thought, but in fact by the time anyone realizes what's happening, it's usually too late.
"All political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. The communist party must command all the guns, that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party." -- Mao Zedong
>This is what scares me about the current attitude (nationally) towards gun control.
The current attitude stems from a desire for civility and public safety. Why would that scare you?
>The right to bear arms is a basic civil right, unambiguously encoded in the Bill of Rights alongside speech, assembly, religion, due process, etc.
It's not unambiguously encoded. If it were, there would not be entire debates over the meaning of the punctuation. People are unambiguous in their interpretations because of political ideology.
>Throughout history, taking away weapons has always been an early step down the slippery slope to totalitarianism and stripping the populous of their other rights.
Yes, but regulation is not confiscation, and the commonly held assumption on the part of many gun owners that the former inevitably leads to the latter (or is merely a knowing pretense towards the latter) is an uncharitable interpretation of the opposing point of view. Americans maintain the right to keep and bear arms even if that right doesn't extend to all possible arms under all possible circumstances.
"All political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. The communist party must command all the guns, that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party." -- Mao Zedong"
The anti gun-control argument is, ironically, also that all political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, but that power is liberty when the guns are pointed at the state and tyranny when the guns are pointed by the state. And yet anyone who simply doesn't want themselves or their children getting shot by psychopaths are considered unreasonable, because it's also liberty by proxy when those guns are pointed by the people at the people, and Americans are expected not only to tolerate and accept it, but be wary to question it.
Is it not possible that there is a reasonable middle ground between the NRA and Stalinist gulags?
>lots of terrible things have been done "with the best of intentions". It's hardly a reason not to be scared.
Are you referring to gun control or the 2nd Amendment, here?
It's a reason to be scared, if you're paranoid and believe the only thing keeping your government from killing you is the fear of your gun barrel against its heads. But I don't believe such a fear is reasonable, or worthy of the weight it seems to be given in American political discourse.
Let's talk in practical terms for a second, though. Do you truly believe that gun ownership in the US could result in a bunch of citizens overthrowing the US government should it become tyrannical? I just don't see it happening. The US military is far too well-trained and -armed, and of course a hypothetical tyrannical US government would turn the military against its citizens if there was an armed uprising. And they would win so laughably easily.
Now sure, there's the possibility that factions in the military would turn against this tyrannical government and save the day, but you don't need the 2nd Amendment for that to work out.
And us citizens have more weapons than the taliban; longer harder to protect borders than Afghanistan; and a population that would be sympathetic to the cause. I wouldn’t be so sure the us military would win.
According to current military doctrine[0], counterinsurgency requires a minimum of 1 counterinsurgent per 50 people in the population. If you assume ALL us military personnel can serve in combat simultaneously (ie: no troops required for supply lines, paperwork, management, etc), and you included all police forces in the US, you would only get to 1 per 100.
So you say they would "win so laughably easily".. but according to the military itself, it does not have enough troops to handle an insurgency in the US.
0. As written in the Army and Marine Corps field manual (and this doctrine was based on research of past (us and non-us) conflicts)
Also, 99 percent of the US military will defect to protect their own country against a rogue federal government. These are normal, good people who signed up to protect us.
I think there's also a very subtle line here as well in that guns don't necessarily have to defeat the military, but that guns can help protect citizens against corrupt local government.
This happened during the civil rights era, in that armed African Americans were able to prevent attacks in many cases or even just police brutality simply by the presence of guns in the hands of the victims.
I think a complete government meltdown is often used as the defense for gun ownership, but given how our government is structured (more control given to states and local communities while trying to balance it with centralized power in the federal government), guns can help keep order when in the hands of citizens.
Of course, like the constant balance of local and centralized government, we will forever need to balance the rights of individuals vs. the safety of the collective.
In my opinion, it is not about overthrowing the government, it is about a right to self-defense. Not just from the government, but also from your average criminal.
It's true that a citizen or even a group of citizens is no match for the military. But the difference is between citizens being able to try defending themselves, and being completely defenseless.
It is the difference between soldiers being ordered to fire their own citizens, and the citizens being defenseless. It is the difference between individuals who swore to defend their countrymen having to reconcile killing them in battle. It is the difference between a confidence that you can do something and a feeling that you can be easily intimidated.
China, Russia, Iraq, Germany, in all of these places the general population was disarmed as one of the first steps towards totalitarianism. It is not a coincidence.
> Not just from the government, but also from your average criminal.
And yet the US has one of the highest homicide rates for developed countries in the world, while sporting the highest (by far) firearm per capita in the world.
So something with that nice argument you, and others, have is not working.
> The US military is far too well-trained and -armed, and of course a hypothetical tyrannical US government would turn the military against its citizens if there was an armed uprising. And they would win so laughably easily.
I doubt it. The US failed in Vietnam and has been struggling in Afghanistan since 2001. Tanks and planes do not win wars. Small arms do.
EDIT: Dystopian follow-on thought. I wonder if this paradigm changes as drones improve? Would civilians have any defense? Perhaps history just repeats itself.
I wouldn't count on the US military necessarily siding with a tyrannical government that has stripped its populace of its Constitutional rights.
Here's the Oath of Enlistment with a few points of emphasis:
I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."
As someone who formerly served in the US military, you would be hard pressed to find anyone in it that still remembered the oath they took, much less nuanced details like what you pointed out, while half asleep at MEPS that one fateful day after hours of testing and medical prodding.
> Do you truly believe that gun ownership in the US could result in a bunch of citizens overthrowing the US government should it become tyrannical?
no. it's not about overthrow. it's about meaningful #resistance in the face of braindead authoritarian pepperspray cops without the spine to think for themselves.
gun owners aren't at the range practicing political science, and international business, and and learning to be lawyers (though some probably are)...
they're protecting their inalienable right to resist authoritarians
It scares me that there are people who think any type of resistance against the government would be hopeless, and would prefer to disarm the public for a false sense of security.
One thing I don't get is that those who are anti-gun don't seem to have much faith in the government to begin with, what makes them think that they won't continue to take away rights as soon as the public is disarmed, given that it has happened time and time again all over the world.
So you are suggesting we just accept enslavement? Can you explain to me how that isn't stockholm syndrome? I'm sorry but even if the odds are zero, I among many others would rather go down fighting to protect our liberties. These are rights given to us by our creator, not government.
We should not need to rely on the morals of the military.
> Throughout history, taking away weapons has always been an early step down the slippery slope to totalitarianism and stripping the populous of their other rights.
Only in retrospect: if you look at non-ephemeral totalitarian regimes, they don't typically allow dissenters to freely control effective weapons... but if you start from the other direction and examine states which do not allow their populace to freely control effective weapons, your examination pool is most of the states in the world, most of which are not (typically considered) totalitarian.
I wonder what bias author Mark Pitcavage brings to the discussion. According to twitter profile he is connected to https://www.adl.org/who-we-are which claims to be some kind of anti-semitism group. (Which I have never heard of before)
So you've never seen the movie Tombstone? You think there's no legitimate history of measured gun control in this country, and that any departure from the current trend is a slippery slope to a dictatorial state?
I have to wonder whether gun ownership is preventing totalitarianism government when the will of the people to resist or even recognise authoritarianism is lacking. As a European, facts such as the incarceration rate of the US being second only to the Seychelles strike me as oddly dystopian.
If by Europeans, you mean white, then that isn't true. The US incarcerates whites at the rate of 450 per 100k which is roughly double the rate of any European country except for Russia and equal to Russia's rate. It's triple or more the rate of incarceration in most of Western Europe.
If you are referring to people who are actually from European countries, then I haven't seen data on that, but Europeans in the US would be a very small non-representative sample of Europeans, so I fail to see the relevance.
Yes, Europe is sending us their best so the sample in the US is not representative.
I think you are responding to someone talking about people who share the cultural upbringing of Europe rather than race. Unless you think race is a powerful indicator of criminality?
>Throughout history, taking away weapons has always been an early step down the slippery slope to totalitarianism and stripping the populous of their other rights.
Only in places/eras where having weapons mattered.
It's not like anybody's gonna take on the feds with their guns.
Eh it's a fair omission. The war on drugs has only fueled the civil forfeiture issue, as it's a commonly pointed to reason by officers why they think someone carrying an excess of cash is up to no good: "We suspect this money is connected to a drug operation".
I don't know if there's a term for it, but if anyone knows or can coin something on the spot to describe the phenomenon where the Drug War and other aspects of American criminal law has invariably irritated smaller undressed wounds within the criminal justice system and caused them to open up as larger festering problems that probably wouldn't have seen as much widespread public attention otherwise-outside of specialized legal communities and advocacy circles.
Examples of what I mean are, as mentioned Drug War -> Civil Forfeiture, PATRIOT Act -> Due Process for War Detainees, Snowden -> Due process for surveillance investigations, etc.
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't an issue!
The 4th amendment is being attacked by both conservatives and liberals in a variety of ways. From NSA data collections on Americans under Obama, to DEA/BATF sponsored civil asset forfeiture under Bush, and unlawful searches by ICE under the current administration, this Amendment is very important but is being chipped away by both authoritarian ideologies.
Ah, our 5th amendment has been weakened by both liberals and conservatives. From No Fly lists and travel bans you can't get out of, to waiting periods on firearms, we've truly let this very important amendment become weakened.
I like all of the amendments. I don't want to see any single one of them weakened any more and some of our rights restored.
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 when they are inevitably inconvenient?
We need to stand for all the BoR. Not whatever is convenient.
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.
Are you implying that gun-owners would suddenly wage war on the nation if they were told to hand over (some portion of) their guns in the next year or face civil penalties? Doesn't it seem far more likely that most law-abiding folks would hand over their weapons to avoid interruption to their lives, possibly retaining one or two illegally?
Most of the people I know would complain and protest any confiscation, but I doubt they would shoot a law officer to protect that privilege. They would simply lose too much in return for that exchange.
I just don't understand the generality of the assertion. Law-abiding folks are suddenly going to become violent because the government changed one law? I can certainly believe that some segment of the population might revolt, but broad-scale revolt seems rather unlikely. Most of us are well-fed and entertained enough that the loss of firearms would be an irritant, not an issue worth risking life and limb over. Something like prohibition seems far more likely. Some folks would retain whatever weapons were deemed illegal, while the vast majority of folks would hand-over the bulk of their weapons and possibly retain whatever they thought they could conceal.
I think there’s a sizable part of the population which believes very strongly that what would come after gun confiscation is worth fighting a war to prevent.
And you can’t fight that war if you aren’t armed for it. So it’s a do or die / back up against the wall proposition at that point.
Men rise up in violence all the time to protect what is sacred to them. “Change one law” is I think not an accurate depiction of the premise I was responding to - which was repeal of the 2nd amendment and large scale gun confiscation.
With respect to the 'change one law' phrasing - I don't think a repeal of the 2nd immediately leads to confiscation. It only removes the federal restrictions, but several state constitutions have the right explicitly enshrined. Pennsylvania is a good example, but I believe there are others. Confiscation would probably require not only an appeal of the 2nd, but also repeal of any state laws as well. I tend to believe that would result a slow, piecemeal process where individual states go through confiscation one by one.
That said, your point can certainly stand at a state level. I still think how the process is managed impacts the broader social response. An approach that attempted to leave bolt-action/small capacity shotguns and files in place may be received differently than a wholesale ban. An approach that only eliminated 'assault weapons' but left handguns would have a different impact than an approach that required both to be turned-in. There's lots of ways to drive a confiscation, with lesser or greater outcomes on how people resist, I would think.
Kinda a straw man, though. If you're of the crowd that thinks the government should legislate the 2nd away, then sure, you should take Greenfield's words to heart and have a good think.
But nowhere does he suggest that a constitutional amendment to repeal the 2nd would be a bad thing; he doesn't even touch on the amendment process at all.
(Also I don't get where he's saying that conservatives love the 1st and second, liberals love the 4th, 5th, and 6th, and they both hate what the other loves. I have a dim view of the 2nd but I'm pretty happy with the other 9. It's kinda ridiculous to suggest that liberal are against the 1st.)
Something something bringing a knife to a gun fight...
The amendment doesn't specify firearms; it just so happens that firearms are the most contentious weapons protected under it, for obvious reasons: firearms are among the most deadly weapons in common use, but hoplophilic citizens do not want to be denied access to weapons their enemies have access to. Nevertheless, there was a Second Amendment case brought to the Supremes (Caetano v. Massachusetts) about a woman's right to buy a stun gun, which was illegal in Massachusetts. The Supremes found in her favor.
As for why the Second is considered "special" -- it's part of the Bill of Rights. There's nothing stopping anybody from repealing it, but the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights are considered special in American legal tradition because the promise of their passage was essential to the ratification of the Constitution itself. So it would take much more effort to gather support for repeal of a Bill of Rights amendment than the Eighteenth Amendment (which was largely passed because of the temporary political vogue of the temperance movement).
>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.
In Europe, democratic countries regularly amend their constitution because parts of it have become archaic, obsolete or insane. We have yet to descend into chaos or tyranny.
As a fellow European, I am also regularly surprised by the absolute reverence to the US Constitution. Sure, it is a fundamental law and it cannot be changed lightly, but like any other piece of legislation it seems normal to update it regularly.
Edit : after looking at the actual list of amendments, at least one was repelled after being introduced (regarding the Prohibition) so it seems they are not as immutable as I believed.
The whole amendment process is designed exactly for this reason. The problem is, nobody seems to want to actually propose a 2nd Amendment repeal and begin the legal process and see if it actually works (because it won't). So instead, everyone gets to whine about gun rights on social media instead of actually working towards accomplishing the goals they claim to be in favor of.
The EU is going to dissolve under it's own regulatory weight. The GDPR is tactical incrementalism of "compliance" procedures. If it lasts long enough people will realize it's not about making them more free.
This is what I, as a pro-gun-control person, keep saying.
By all means, agitate for gun control. But in order to do so you need to successfully present a case for Second Amendment repeal. Anything less -- such as the collective-rights argument -- means that you've empowered the courts to interpret away the force of the Second Amendment. And once you've unleashed that beast, you won't be able to control it. The courts will interpret away the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments, and then we're in really deep shit.
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.
You have Donald Trump trying to undermine the news media, attacking people for expressing their opinions by refusing to stand for the anthem, calling for stripping the citizenship from those who burn the US flag, and wanting a ban on Muslims entering the country.
Attacks on individual liberties are not limited to a particular political ideology.
By "attacking" you mean calling some news fake news and criticizing other people's political statements. Those things are within the law. Jailing people for their political opinion, like they do in UK, China and Iran, is a violation.
Anyone trying to make laws allowing those things would be attacking the first.
I'm a big fan of the amendments as well. I think we're all better served when we focus on specific issues that we can discuss together rather than splitting us up into two camps. As long as we look at everything through a partisan lens, we're going to continue to increase the friction preventing us from finding common ground and understanding.
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.
I don't believe that interpretation is a stretch at all. Griswold vs. Connecticut established that the 3rd amendment infers a right to privacy from the government in one's home.
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.
Actually, this is one of my main retrospective concerns with the tactics we were using in Iraq and I assume Afghanistan. We would literally take over some random families complex at night and dig in for the fight come morning. It was sop, but it wasn't till after I got out and thought to myself, hey that seems like a violation of the 3rd amendment even if it's in another country during a time of war.
It would be tautological to consider the Supreme Court's decision to be the final word on the truth of the matter - doing so would imply that it's impossible for the government to systematically violate any rights/laws.
Yes, I understand that. Please don't fling URLs around as a substitute for discussion.
The court dismissing the idea that there is a 3rd Amendment issue could exactly be what the parent was talking about, if he does indeed believe it was a 3rd Amendment issue.
I sure get distressed when otherwise intelligent and educated Americans sincerely tell me: "Sure I believe in free speech, but you can't let that guy say those things!" They'll throw it all away for some insignificant gain.
How prevalent is that, really? I have literally never heard anyone say that, ever. I've certainly heard people express anger or disgust at some things people have said, but I have not heard anyone ever suggest that it should be illegal to say those things.
It’s a pretty standard view among the left in the US that “hate speech is not protected speech”, and that anything they deem to be “hateful” should be illegal.
Counterpoint: propaganda is a thing, how do you get the benefits of robust (and I don’t mean loud or rude) debate to find the best policies without the risks of propaganda?
How do I know I have not fallen for propaganda myself when I argue for or against some policy?
There are likely some physics laws that can explain this better than I can, but the farther in time you get from a physical event, the more information is lost (entropy leaving your light cone). This leads to 'evidence' that allows multiple valid interpretations.
Those who say the world is flat are wrong. Those who say it’s sphical are also wrong, but less wrong. Those who say they are equally wrong are more wrong than either of them.
I am no American, but I think Americans are wise to revere their Bill of Rights partly because it is a reasonably good model for rights that everyone should have but also because Americans have lived for a long time with those particular and have made them mostly work. And as the article makes clear, the Bill of Rights didn't really just happen in 1789, it has evolved and (mostly) improved over 200+ years.
And that's a good reason to be skeptical of worries about "fetshising" it and dreams of how you could "remake the legal and political world". Big changes happened after the Revolution and the Civil War, how could they not? But evolution has happened at at all other times.
"...And he worries that this process of reinvention may have stalled, with Americans now fetishizing the Bill of Rights, having lost sight of their own ability to remake the legal and political world..."
And I'm beginning to seriously doubt my time commitment to this article.
The actual history of the Constitution and Bill of Rights is quite interesting and involved. It covers everything from classical literature and history to The Enlightenment and the Thirty Years' War. Just talking about how some folks revere the docs so much now and didn't in the past is breathtakingly shallow. As an example of how short-sighted this is, note that the BoR wasn't supposed to say anything that needed saying. Some questioned the need for them at all. The government wasn't constructed to get that overpowering and intrusive into all of our lives. It's made not to do that. Why should we start making lists of things it can't do? It obviously can't do anything we didn't tell it to do.
The founders in the U.S. dispassionately threw together a huge chunk of natural science, philosophy, and history, made a ton of compromises, and did the best they could. You don't have to worship or deify the folks or the documents they made. Just understand what was done and why. That's much more useful than going on at length about how unhealthy some segments of the population are being.
This article is a political polemic, not a history lesson (unless you consider it a lesson on how things get more and less popular over time, which says absolutely nothing about the BoR) I love political essays that show how public thought changes over time. These kinds of essays tend to be difficult to discuss in large diverse online groups -- and many times, sadly, their purpose is to create false, simplistic narratives that can take the place of understanding. Best consumed in small doses and with lots of context.
In the post, Magglioca says that the bill of rights was not what people of the time thought a bill of rights looked like. Well I find it is not accurate to say that since many ideas were lifted from the English Bill of Rights 1689. No standing armies in peacetime, freedom of speech of parliament, peasants bearing arms, no cruel unusual punishment, no excessive bails, no taxes without parliament. I hope that I am missing something in translation, because it is unsettling that he would overlook this. The Virginian Bill of Rights mentioned in the story took from this as well. In other words, it set a standard.
In New Zealand we don't have a constitution. But rather we have a Bill of Rights defined in law, which can be changed by an act of parliament, and a series of laws defined around this bill of rights.
It's not the constitution that makes a country free, but the people fighting for their rights. New Zealand gave women the vote before any other country in the world, and we didn't need a constitution to do it, but rather the willpower of the people.
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 liberties would erode at a much faster rate. As another comment says "Unfortunately, pretty much all of the BoR is regularly under attack." If the BoR didn't have the same nearly religious status one of those attacks would have succeeded by now.
> 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.
Yes, people get these things arse-backwards. They notice that laws are just pieces of paper, and think that's a reason to disrespect them. But so long as the law is worth having, the fact that it is a mere defenceless piece of paper is the very reason while people have a duty to act them out in the real world.
And what's worst is that the "it's only a piece of paper" argument seems to be trotted out mostly against laws, such as constitutions, which underpin important, time-tested rights. No one is so eager to point out that the latest act granting power to this-or-that official is also just a piece of paper.
I ctrl+f'd "natural rights" and came up with nothing, which is how I knew from the start this wasn't a very good article on the subject.
Look, here is the thing that people have forgotten, or were never taught (due to a failing civics education system):
People have natural rights, independent of any government, and governments are formed among the people in order to protect those rights. The government does not grant rights!It can not take them without due process!
This is the fundamental principle of what I consider real American exceptionalism, and why American government at least in principle is the most free system of government in existence. (despite it's failings to live up those principles often) It's why Christopher Hitchens became an American and called it "the last revolution that stands a chance".
This was the original debate about the Bill of Rights in the first place. That by listing a few important rights the government would then think anything not listed would be allowed for the government to violate. Hence the "right to wear a hat" argument. That's not how things work though, and that's not what our government was founded on.
I'll give you a good example. Locke calls the right to self defense the first natural right. I agree. The second amendment is about defense against a tyrannic government. You could take it away and I would still have a right to bear arms independent of the (theoretically) absent second amendment.
Both parties hate stating this sort of thing out loud though because what they both are is authoritarian. For the conservatives, it would undermine all kinds of their moves like the drug war (unconstitutional abuse of commerce clause, states rights), and the same can be said of the left. This is why I get tired of all the cries anytime someone sees through the bullshit and calls them both equally corrupt, which they are, and are immediately hit with logically fallacious half-retorts of "whataboutism" and other rebuttle du jours.
I swore an oath to the Constitution, and I stand on those principles even when they make me uncomfortable. I'll give you another example. I always thought FDR's New Deal was one of the best things ever, a brilliant move we should seek to emulate in the modern day. When I dug into it though, I have to admit I have seen enough evidence that many of the New Deal policies were unconstitutional that I have an entire reading list prepped just to dig into the matter. So you can see how for someone who really wants more wealth equality how difficult it is to potentially admit minimum wage just might be unconstiutional. At least I am meeting those hard questions head on though, instead of burying my head in the sand.
> People have natural rights, independent of any government, and governments are formed among the people in order to protect those rights.
Not really. We've come up with that fiction because we believe -- and we're probably right -- that it gives us the best chance at living together peacefully and without interfering too much with each people's lives.
But it really is a fiction. I personally believe in what you call a person's natural rights, but that's all it is, just a belief. It takes all of us to band together and form structures to enforce and protect those rights for people to be able to enjoy them.
> The second amendment is about defense against a tyrannic government. You could take it away and I would still have a right to bear arms independent of the (theoretically) absent second amendment.
I mean, sure, if you define "right" in that way, then you can say you have the "right" to literally anything. If the 2nd Amendment were repealed, that imagined "natural right" won't help you much when the government comes and takes your guns away, or jails or kills you for having them when you try to fight back.
There is no absolute moral truth here. It's only what we've collectively decided on, and we still have a long way to go before everyone in the world is treated equally and with dignity. We look at the world 500 years ago and think of how uncivilized everything was, and how poorly people treated each other. In another 500 years they'll be saying the same about us, assuming we don't destroy ourselves before then.
“Natural rights” don’t come naturally. Something is a “natural right” not because laws of physics dictate they are inviolable but because they are essential to humanity and peaceful existence, and every human is born into them.
The “natural rights” to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, assembly, association, religion, arms, etc. are the closest we’ve come as a race to “absolute moral truth”.
> I mean, sure, if you define "right" in that way, then you can say you have the "right" to literally anything.
If? No, that is how rights are defined in the US. As long as a right doesn't violate the right of another person. This is what makes the US unique. The US government doesn't give us rights, we already have them. The constitution grants limited powers to the government. That is why it wouldn't matter of the 2nd amendment disappeared, we already have the right to self-defense. The 2nd just called out that the fact government doesn't have the power to remove that right.
If the government moves to take guns away and kills people to do it. In other words, if they try to warp the meaning of our rights, then that is the another reason to be armed.
Why does the headline say "the Bill the Rights" instead of "the Bill of Rights"? Is this the glaringly obvious typo it appears to be or am I missing something?
This is the actual headline of the article, not just the HN headline.
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 unlawful entry or search); privacy of all correspondence (including phone conversations); right to challenge actions of government officials and bodies in court; right to a job; work week limited to 40 hours; free medical care; welfare payments in old age, sickness, or disability; free housing; free education; academic freedom for scientists.
It's a very good list, and what I listed above isn't even half of it [1]. Precisely none of those were actually respected by the government. Having a Bill of Rights is great, but having a tradition of limited government, checks and balances, and rule of law is what gives those guarantees any weight.
[1] https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....