A fuller quote from crazy David Yerushalmi.

There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote. You might not agree or like the idea but this country’s founders, otherwise held in the highest esteem for their understanding of human nature and its affect on political society, certainly took it seriously. Why is that? Were they so flawed in their political reckonings that they manhandled the most important aspect of a free society – the vote? If the vote counts for so much in a free and liberal democracy as we “know” it today, why did they limit the vote so dramatically?

Indeed, the transformation from what this country was and what it is today has been wholesale. The highest good is now not political virtue, personal responsibility, and national existence but RIGHTS. Rights are of the highest order of political value precisely because they are about Method or Process. The extrapolation of this trend is now clear for even those who refuse to look beyond the day’s headlines in a vain effort to avoid the political horizon. The fact that a retarded person can vote [i.e., literacy tests have been outlawed] but a child cannot is not sustainable and eventually the ACLU will successfully challenge this baseless age discrimination. Just like the laws against “consensual” sex with minors, or animals, or polygamy will eventually be challenged and held to be
unconstitutional in the same way sodomy has been transformed into a “right,” when it once was an absolute abomination to the vast, vast majority of Americans. But it was (and is) an abomination not because of the “vast, vast majority of Americans” who held it to be, it was so because Americans knew it to be morally repugnant. When Process and Rights replace the moral compass supplied by this country’s Judeo-Christian
foundings, nothing, absolutely nothing can be morally repugnant anymore, at least not in the eyes of the law. (See especially Justice Scalia’s dissent in Lawrence v. Texas.)