Posted on 04/23/2006 8:01:06 AM PDT by Religion Moderator
The church of Christ does not teach that someone received a different revelation from God well after the Bible was written. However, the Mormon church does just that.
Hi boop!
You do realize (do you not) that this discussion is an exquisite distillation of the essential controversy over which you do near-daily battle?
On the one side we have your insistence that the Bill of Rights is in a planned order, guided by intelligence and intent. On the other hand (Hi PH!) we have the contention that the Bill of Rights is nothing but a random collection of ideas, possessing no particular significance in the final arrangement of their order.
Classic.
Classic indeed. Thank you for the ping!
Hi YHAOS! Of course it is. Whether there were twelve or ten amendments submitted to the states for ratification seems to me to be beside the point. The piece de resistance is that it was the Framers themselves who chose the "order of the book" that became the Bill of Rights. And there is a reason behind what they decided.
First you have the sovereign individual rights (First Amendment): Religious liberty, free speech, the right to assemble, and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Next you have the Second Amendment, the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, which the Framers are telling us, by putting it immediately second, is the "teeth" the people have to ensure they can legitimately defend their rights as set forth in the First Amendment against the depredations of unjust power if all else fails. And so forth and so on, down the line, in an order that goes from closest to the People to what is further away from their immediate concerns.
The layout of the main body of the Constitution similarly reveals the Framers' intentions and priorities: Starting with the Preamble, the We the People, which are the true sovereigns of our constitutional order. Following next, Article I, dealing with Congress -- the branch of government closest to the people and their "agents." In Section 8, Congress receives its just powers from the People. In Article II, dealing with the Executive, the People spell out the powers of the Chief Executive (and chief law enforcement officer and commander in chief in wartime). The President is the president of the whole people, and a substantial part of his role in our system relates to international relations. Then on to Article III, and so forth. It mirrors the technique used in the order of priority of the BoR: an order that goes from closest to the People to what is further away from their immediate concerns.
Just the very layout of the document clearly indicates who in our system has what powers, and all refer back to the Preamble as the source of their authority.
The Framers apparently took great thought in crafting the order of the presentation of the Constitution, just as they did with the BoR. But to see this, you cannot read the Constitution as if it were merely an "instructional manual," to be read literally for its information content. If you truly want to grasp its meaning, you have to "read in between the lines." When you do that, you see this amazingly organic, and astonishingly self-consistent document that makes no bones about the fact that, for the Framers, it is We the People who are the final authority.
Anyhoot. The fans of a "living constitution" do not see it this way, I gather....
Thank you so much for writing, YHAOS!
Uh ... BB, I guess my earlier posts on this weren't clear. What is now the First Amendment was originally the third. That's the package that the authors of the Bill of Rights sent to Congress. That's what Congress passed and sent to the states. If the whole package had been ratified by the states, as originally drafted and passed by Congress, then what we now know as the First Amendment would be the Third Amendment. There was no grand design to make the (present) First be number one on the list. It was number three (on a list of twelve).
No state knew what the others would do. When the dust settled, the original first and second didn't get ratified. The original third amendment thus became what we now know as the First.
". . . it was the Framers themselves who chose the "order of the book" that became the Bill of Rights"
Take the ten articles and radomly re-order them. See if they present as logical and comprehensible an organic structure. Now put them back in their original order, and try to determine where you might most logically insert the other two articles so that they would fit in appropriately. This would be a futile excercise for anyone who regards our Bill of Rights as being "sort-a like Topsey, they just growed." Come to think of it, this would be an equally futile exercise for the rest of us, who grasp its significance absent the need to do an exercise.
In deed...
"If the Constitution is to be construed to mean what the majority at any given period in history wish the Constitution to mean, why a written Constitution?"--Frank J. Hogan, President, American Bar Assn. (1939)
Dear Patrick, with all due and sincere respect, the "scientific method" is not the tool of choice for deliberating and deciding these issues. As long as you stay in that rut, you will continue to miss the entire point of the Framers' exercise.
Seemed to me that betty boop's assertions would be apparant by reading the Supreme Court's guidelines for making decisions when rights are in conflict. Unfortunately I'm too tired right now to pursue it any further. Maybe tomorrow though...
Well I gather that some people get this, and some people don't. It seems to me the American future (if there is to be one) belongs to the people who "get this."
FWIW. Thanks, dear YHAOS, for getting the point.
So it can't be willy-nilly defeated by passing fashion, half-baked ideologies, and self-interested opinion is why. IMHO FWIW.
It seems the advocates of the immediately foregoing will attack the very language of the Constitution to make it say what it doesn't say, because otherwise such folk wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
I heard that.. Graduating "thousands" of graduates out of American colleges as hard core socialists(future leaders) is devolution in progress.. And some say the future is a mystery.. its not.. a mystery at all...
The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections. [319 U.S. 624, 639] In weighing arguments of the parties it is important to distinguish between the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as an instrument for transmitting the principles of the First Amendment and those cases in which it is applied for its own sake. The test of legislation which collides with the Fourteenth Amendment, because it also collides with the principles of the First, is much more definite than the test when only the Fourteenth is involved. Much of the vagueness of the due process clause disappears when the specific prohibitions of the First become its standard. The right of a State to regulate, for example, a public utility may well include, so far as the due process test is concerned, power to impose all of the restrictions which a legislature may have a 'rational basis' for adopting. But freedoms of speech and of press, of assembly, and of worship may not be infringed on such slender grounds. They are susceptible of restriction only to prevent grave and immediate danger to interests which the state may lawfully protect. It is important to note that while it is the Fourteenth Amendment which bears directly upon the State it is the more specific limiting principles of the First Amendment that finally govern this case.
Nor does our duty to apply the Bill of Rights to assertions of official authority depend upon our possession of marked competence in the field where the invasion of rights occurs. True, the task of translating the majestic generalities of the Bill of Rights, conceived as part of the pattern of liberal government in the eighteenth century, into concrete restraints on officials dealing with the problems of the twentieth century, is one to disturb self-confidence. These principles grew in soil which also produced a philosophy that the individual was the center of society, that his liberty was attainable through mere absence of governmental restraints, and that government should be entrusted with few controls and only the mildest supervi- [319 U.S. 624, 640] sion over men's affairs. We must transplant these rights to a soil in which the laissez-faire concept or principle of non-interference has withered at least as to economic affairs, and social advancements are increasingly sought through closer integration of society and through expanded and strengthened governmental controls. These changed conditions often deprive precedents of reliability and cast us more than we would choose upon our own judgment. But we act in these matters not by authority of our competence but by force of our commissions. We cannot, because of modest estimates of our competence in such specialties as public education, withhold the judgment that history authenticates as the function of this Court when liberty is infringed.
Bears repeating! Thank you ever so much Alamo-Girl!
You are quite welcome, dear sister in Christ!
This wonderful insight from your link, Alamo-Girl. It seems to me the silencing of religious expression in the public square as our secularist/atheist friends demand would be tantamount to the imposition of an "officially disciplined uniformity" that, as Justice Jackson points out here on historical grounds, would lead to a "disappointing and disastrous end." Certainly it would strengthen the powers of government vis-a-vis the individual. Which is precisely what the First Amendment was designed to prevent in matters of freedom of mind.
Thanks for the great link!
Actually, given how the courts have twisted the meaning of the Constitution so much, I'm beginning to think that having an unwritten constitution is a better strategy.
It seems to work pretty well for the Brits. What sayest thou, friends from accross the pond?
England is a democracy. A democracy is Mob Rule and they have not discovered that socialism is slavery by giverment yet..
Pretty much the same in all of URP...
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