[monkfan]

Since this is FR, I'll throw in a political analogy. The baby-killers point to the U.S. Constitution and claim it guarantees a right to an abortion. Since this is a false claim, it does nothing to discredit the idea of appealing to the text of the Constitution for ultimate legal authority (sola constitutiona?) rather than tradition (judicial precedent, case law, living-document crap).

The problem with appealing to a text is that, once again, different people will interpret the text differently. An honest approach would be to try and determine the ideas that the text was intended to convey. But some people have an agenda that they would like to push and will misinterpret the text to achieve said agenda.

[Sloth]

This is true. But tradition can also be susceptible to an agenda -- I'd say even more so, as it can more easily be changed over time than static text.