re: #520 wozzablog

The constitution was written by slave holders - and all men being created equal did not include women, gays, lesbians, black people, native americans… or none landholding white guys.

Strict constructionalism in that adhering to the principles of the founders and it’s intent as written in the 18th century is just not one i have a lot of truck with.

SCOTUS decisions to extend rights from those recognizable in the 18th century to ones we recognise in the 21st can only be a good thing.

I wonder what you’d think of Barry Rubin’s take on this idea.

The first point is about the nature of American history. There is a huge difference between saying that the promise hasn’t or wasn’t kept, and, on the contrary, saying that it took a while to fulfill that promise. In the end and along the way, though, the promise was kept.

Therefore, American history is not a series of shames and disgraces but one of heroic fulfillment. Everything bad is matched by more that has been good. Or, to put it another way, it is not that wrong things weren’t done but that they were corrected. Now here’s the key: That was possible because of the nature of the promise, the foundation it created, and the system it set up.

And that is the difference between celebrating America and its history—with no need to conceal its (almost always remedied) flaws and failures—or in contrast teaching self-hatred and anti-Americanism. That also means the people of today cannot claim to be great geniuses of morality and wisdom but merely the lucky inheritors of what has been achieved by those who lived before them.

Second, the reason the promise could be kept was that the founders laid a foundation which made that possible. Even if they did not then, in the 1770s and 1780s, openly and consciously possess every belief that made for a fully equal society which did not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender or national origin, they implicitly understood all these things.

They planted the seed. The history of the United States is the story of its growth into a healthy tree—the founders would have called it the tree of liberty—that fulfilled that dream and that plan.

RTWT, that was just a teaser.