What do you say...

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HangFire83

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....someone who says the Bill of Rights is outdated.

This came up while out at a bar with some friends, (politics and alcohol don't mix I know) but we kept it to a friendly debate and with out short attention spans, and electronic texas hold'em at the table, moved on to a new subject. The ones who agreed with that statement got real quiet once I asked them if they really thought that freedom of speech was outdated. I let it go after that.

I was just wondering what you guys/gals say in a discussion such as this.
 
Anybody who thinks that the Bill of Rights and Constitution is outdated is an idiot. Those documents were written by some of the smartest and capable men who ever lived. Those documents founded this country on morals and a better quality of life than any other country. Back then, men were real men who stood up for what was right and the progression of mankind. They did what they thought was right and stuck by it. If they saw what has happened to this country they would be so dissapointed. It was when people started straying from those documents and ammending it so much that made it lost its meaning. People took the idea of laws and policing so far over the edge that a world was created with government first and freedom a far second, how so very sad.
 
Careful. Those men were not perfect. I don't think anyone that owned slaves can truly be considered moral by today's standards. Equality and freedom to them was for white men, not for women, blacks and natives.


The Constitution is certainly not outdated (except for that funny little amendment that includes a mention of twenty bucks...in another century that won't be enough to buy a pack of gum) but it's silly to hero worship and claim those men were somehow divinely inspired and could do no wrong. They made plenty of mistakes.
 
There are really two arguments, here. The "Constitution" itself is largely outdated, due to the slavery issues, the women's rights issues, the fact that originally only a landowner could vote, etc... The Constitution was drafted by a bunch of weathy, aristocratic, slave-owning white men who didn't want to pay their taxes. As such, we as a country have moved past many of the nuances of the originally-drafted Constitution, toward an America grounded in much more "equality" than was ever conceived by the Framers.

But, I believe the original question didn't ask about the "Constitution" per se, but rather about the "Bill of Rights." That document is alive and kicking! Although, so much of the Bill of Rights is taken for granted by Americans who don't understand what it was like before the Bill of Rights was written.

Example: Quartering of soldiers in one's home was a HUGE problem in the Colonies. If a farmer had crops he was raising (or daughters), a regiment of British soldiers could sweep through, eat all the food, rape all the women, and there would basically be nothing the farmer could do about it! Now, that sort of thing doesn't happen anymore. However, people often fail to realize exactly how efficient the Bill of Rights is in enforcing the American way of life.

No, I don't think the Bill of Rights is outdated.
 
Moral by todays standard you have got to be kidding. Todays standard is next to or no morals in Washington District of Criminals.
 
PHP: 
[Anybody who thinks that the Bill of Rights and Constitution is outdated is an idiot/PHP]

I agree whole heartedly
 
Moral by todays standard you have got to be kidding. Todays standard is next to or no morals in Washington District of Criminals.
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Every generation says that. Every generation has less morals as percieved by the previous one. Doesn't matter if you're 20 or 70 I guarantee that your grandfather's generation thought yours was as immoral as my generation will think the next two are.
 
"Every generation says that. Every generation has less morals as percieved by the previous one. Doesn't matter if you're 20 or 70 I guarantee that your grandfather's generation thought yours was as immoral as my generation will think the next two are."

And maybe they were, and we are, right. I believe it to a large degree.
 
And maybe they were, and we are, right. I believe it to a large degree.
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Maybe but I have a hard time believing that a generation which wanted blacks to drink out of seperate water fountains can really call itself any more "moral" than the current one. I have a hard time believing the same of a generation that owned slaves or a generation that killed natives for their land or because they wouldn't convert to christianity.
 
Those documents

Have been here before this "Covertment" and will be here after its gone. All these new unlawful laws are null and void.
 
If the Bill of Rights didn't exist, our Rights would still exist.

If it were determined that the whole document should go in the dumper, our Rights would still exist.

If the government supressed all the rights outlined in the BoR, our Rights would still exist.

Is it outdated? The question is irrelevant. Is the Magna Carta outdated? Still irrelevant.

Basic Human Rights are immutable.

-Dave
 
If the Bill of Rights didn't exist, our Rights would still exist.

If it were determined that the whole document should go in the dumper, our Rights would still exist.

If the government supressed all the rights outlined in the BoR, our Rights would still exist.

Is it outdated? The question is irrelevant. Is the Magna Carta outdated? Still irrelevant.

Basic Human Rights are immutable.

-Dave
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while I completely agree with you the problem is that not everyone agrees what those basic human rights are. some people believe that a woman's choice in childbirth should be a basic human right and others believe that the ability to defend onesself is not :/
 
I for one am very thankful for those men that had the foresight to write those documents. No matter what else they did or how they lived their lives what they did makes it possible for us to write here and live our lives with the freedom we all share as Americans.
Where do you think we would be if that old drinkin slave owner had took em up on that offer to become king? Great men are not perfect, greatness does not mean perfection. We should all read of the sacrifices those men paid, some with their lives, some with just every thing they owned.
 
Sorry about that, Tony. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzz! try again!

Moral? By today's standard you have got to be kidding. Today's standard is next to or no morals in Washington District of Criminals.

"... next to or no morals in Washington District of Criminals.", makes no sense at all.
 
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The right to mangle the language is the essense of freedom! ;) --But it's terribly self-limiting if you hope your words be listened to or read. (My own cross to bear is orthography, usually as a result of wretched typing skills).

As for the Bill of Right being outmoded, a good many of our elected leaders seem to think it is. It's certainly widely misunderstood (and perhaps deliberately so) as granting rights rather than limiting government's power to infringe upon them.

Unlimited government has been tried over and over, in forms from the purest of democracy (Classical Athens, for example) to innummerable types of autocracy, and has always resulted in tyranny and oppression.

Having said that, it seems to me that our Bill of Rights has become a largely empty document; it is outmoded, not because those rights no longer need to be respected by our government but because increasingly, the government does not respect them, relying upon a series of workarounds to render moot the limits they impose.

The next step will be open defiance of those limits; with public opinion favoring such actions, it may come sooner rather than later.
 
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Right and wrong doesn't change... only the perceptions of right and wrong...
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So the generation of the 50s simply percieved segregation as right? Then what's to say the current generation's perception of homosexuality is correct?

Sorry but I just don't believe that there is such a thing as universal right and wrong. Morality is a human construct. We invented good and evil, they exist solely because we attach those words, those ideas, to actions and events.

In two hundred years the very thought of someone using a weapon to harm another person or even the very thought of eating the cooked carcass of an animal might seem as wrong to them as slavery and genocide seem to us.

It's not a cop out because there is no moral absolute. Your generation was as immoral to your grandparents as my generation is to my grandparents. Rock & roll, women showing their ankles...DANCING! How obscene!
 
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