Well obviously we can't bring Washington et al back from the dead to ask him if the 1st amendment covers pornography. My question goes to the notion that if we could bring them back from the dead and ask as to their intent as to what the amendment should allow and should not allow, would we find them assenting to the way the amendment is currently viewed?
We know from reading the Federalist papers of the era that our founders believed that God was involved in the founding and nurturing of the nation, and that the practise of rather broadly agreed upon morality and religious dictates by the majority of the population would keep licentious factionalism in check!
You can poo poo my use of "generalities" as a weakness in my questioning but our founders themselves relied upon the generalities of accepted religion and morality in the population at large to keep the new republic strong.
They knew that to build a consensus based on the concepts of "rights" with-out the benign co-ercion of the latent morality of the Christianized population would be to produce a still-born nation, and at worst a nation of demoralized factions crawling back to Britain for order and security!
"With-out vision, the people are unrestrained" states Proverbs(or literally "go wild"). The culture war that is going on is about that vision of our selves as a great moral nation vs. those who would propose that we should not live under moral restraints; that Americans are nothing more special than animals who live by instinct and not by enlightened reason!
We don't have to ... the words they wrote have a plain meaning.
our founders believed that God was involved in the founding and nurturing of the nation, and that the practise of rather broadly agreed upon morality and religious dictates by the majority of the population would keep licentious factionalism in check!
But they did not believe that government could make people moral. And they were right not to believe it.