We typically call a person who disagrees with the majority a member of the minority.
> the majority
What majority? There are lots of majorities and lots of minorities -- one for each issue put forward to a group of citizens, and then a bunch of other cultural ones.
I doubt anyone is a member of each of those majorities. So yes, everyone needs these individual rights. But the rights were designed to protect individuals when they find themselves in the minority. So saying that the issue is individual rather than minority rights is disingenuous, confusing, and massively ahistorical. Again, many of these rights were explicitly designed to prevent violent mob rule. This issue is not up for debate. It is an historical fact. Go read what the founding fathers wrote about the Bill of rights.
What specifically can you point me to, what founding father, specifically wrote that the Bill of Rights was to protect minorities and not individuals?
I agree the founding fathers drafted the Constitution to prevent mob rule.
If a majority agrees we have freedom of speech, then we don't need the first amendment since it only protects minorities and minority opinions? The individual is the greatest minority, the Constitution protects individuals. Regardless of if an individual currently belongs to the/a majority or minority the Bill of Rights protects them.
EDIT: In other words, whether or not an individual is in the majority or minority opinion on an issue, the Bill of Rights protects the individuals to freely express their opinion. It's not as if an individual holds the majority opinion than they no longer get 1st Amendment protections. The rights belong to individuals not "minorities" (except in the sense that an individual is the greatest minority).
ADD: The founding fathers didn't care about minorities except themselves as individuals. They wrote the Bill of Rights to protect themselves individually.
See my response to ScottBurson. The Constitution does not protect individual rights in general. Instead, it protects a small set of individual rights that are most relevant when that individual finds himself in a minority, so-called minority rights.
It was expected that democratic self-governance would protect against other basic rights (e.g., to freedom from unreasonable taxation, the right to not be raped and murdered, etc.). But most individual rights are not listed in the Constitution, because the purpose of the constitution was to establish democratic self governance with protection for minorities against mob rule. NOT to provide for individual rights.
> What specifically can you point me to, what founding father, specifically wrote that the Bill of Rights was to protect minorities and not individuals?
Read Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural Address, for starters.
Of course rights of minorities are individual rights, since minorities are composed of individuals. But the constitution was designed specifically to protect the rights of minorities, not to protect individual rights in general. The assumption was that democratic self-governance would provide for "little-r" rights; i.e., for fir and just governance.
Thomas Jefferson didn't say "I'm concerned about Sam and Henry over there... they might be in the minority on some opinion or issue in the future so I think we should draft a Bill of Rights to protect them." He probably thought, "I don't want to be screwed over by the majority. Perhaps I should draft some things to protect ME."
Because "ME" could be in the minority, whether by myself or 49.9% of the people.
Sure, they drafted rights to protect them in cases where they were minorities. Isn't that exactly what I'm saying?
I bet Jefferson didn't want to be raped. Wonder why he didn't make that an amendment? Could it have been because he figured that right could be provided in a non-constitutional setting?
