Excerpt From Allow Me to Retort - A Black Man’s Guide to the Constitution:
“Our Constitution is not good. It is a document designed to create a society of enduring white male dominance, hastily edited in the margins to allow for what basic political rights white men could be convinced to share. The Constitution is an imperfect work that urgently and consistently needs to be modified and reimagined to make good on its unrealized promises of justice and equality for all.
And yet you rarely see liberals make the point that the Constitution is actually trash. Conservatives are out here acting like the Constitution was etched by divine flame upon stone tablets, when in reality it was scrawled out over a sweaty summer by people making deals with actual monsters who were trying to protect their rights to rape the humans they held in bondage.”
Framing it as designed to ensure the dominance of one sex and one "race" is not doing the argument any favors. If that is what they set out to do, they did a poor job at it (even the Swiss and Kuwaitis suppressed their women "better") in addition, today, there exists slavery to this day in Chad and DRC, despite it being technically illegal. That argument is further eroded by claiming it's imperfect in enabling a promise. The constitution itself is what gave us the the necessary rights (including freedom of speech itself) to right previous wrongs.
Moreover, you can have a perfectly nice constitution guaranteeing all kinds of rights and freedoms like the USSR did (and I suspect the CCP does) and not enjoy the important aspects enshrined in such document)
But that's a misdirection in any case. It's utterly authoritarian to have a government decide what is truth and what isn't. That's one of the first things authoritarians go after. We should be very weary of anyone espousing the view government should have that right.
Look, I'm not trying to get into a whole culture war thing, but you do realize that the constitution literally had to be amended to give non-whites and women the right to vote? It seems like the constitution did a perfectly good job at doing that.
No disagreement there. What I disagree with is the insinuation that the right to free speech is tainted and thus somehow unjust because the constitution had to be amended. It's a devilish argument.
Fair enough. I didn't read the poster as to mean that so much as to say that flatly stating "support the constitution" is kinda painfully vague in its meaning and not without the problems the poster pointed out in the quote. For sure the constitution is widely misinterpreted, even apparently by members of the supreme court that are now under the belief that it and the bill of rights are an enumerated list of rights, to which otherwise none remain, when it is in fact the opposite. An enumerated list of limited powers granted to the gov't, to which the bill of rights are merely examples of such limitations as applied to individuals, but were never intended to be exhaustive or imply that no other rights existed.
So, imo, and apologies for the controversial political example, but when people ask "where is the right to abortion in the constitution?" they completely miss the point that the actual question must be "where is the right for the government to regulate abortions in the constitution?"
“Our Constitution is not good. It is a document designed to create a society of enduring white male dominance, hastily edited in the margins to allow for what basic political rights white men could be convinced to share. The Constitution is an imperfect work that urgently and consistently needs to be modified and reimagined to make good on its unrealized promises of justice and equality for all.
And yet you rarely see liberals make the point that the Constitution is actually trash. Conservatives are out here acting like the Constitution was etched by divine flame upon stone tablets, when in reality it was scrawled out over a sweaty summer by people making deals with actual monsters who were trying to protect their rights to rape the humans they held in bondage.”
Elie Mystal
https://books.apple.com/us/book/allow-me-to-retort/id1549926...