Over the past few months, the question of rights has been everywhere. The rights of gun owners to possess and carry their weapons. The rights of people to not feel endangered by potential gun-wielding psychopaths. The rights of gay individuals to marry just as freely as heteronormative people. Many of these arguments revolve around the Constitution of the United States – what it says and how it may be interpreted.
But the Constitution has served America so well precisely because it is such an adaptable document – capable of being edited by the people themselves, if they can obtain sufficient support for their motion. The Constitution is a living document to be molded to the needs of the people of the United States. When we forget this fact, we inflict needless suffering on ourselves by pretending the United States government was ever designed to be one specific, unchanging document.
The world we live in is not the world of the founding fathers, and the government we have is not necessarily one that those who designed it could have foreseen. For some, this discrepancy seems like the ultimate betrayal of the way in which America was founded. But this evolution is itself the greatest credit to the American dream that can be found. The Constitution was designed to be adapted and amended to the needs of the people.
The Constitution was created to cater to the needs of the people of its day, but was also designed to be amended by future needs. The original Bill, after all, had only 10 amendments; we have since added 17, dealing with political term limits, the prohibition of alcohol and the subsequent removal of this prohibition and the theoretical equality all citizens are entitled to (though this amendment went over a hundred years without real enforcement and is still violated too often). The Constitution was built to be adaptable to the needs of the people, and its government designed to serve the changing needs of an adaptable nation.
It is also foolish to think that the only rights we are guaranteed are those strictly enumerated in the Bill of Rights. When the Bill was first being debated, there was a substantial group against it because they feared that by naming specific protected rights it would imply to future generations that those rights not named were not guaranteed or protected. To believe that the Constitution is the fountain of all right and reason is to betray the view of a truly free America.
The founding fathers lived in a principally agrarian nation, wielded guns that could only be fired once every several seconds and were not very accurate, were the heirs of several principles of the Enlightenment, counting slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation and extended voting rights only to property-owning white men. The world they lived in was not the world we live in now, and an originalist viewpoint would not be sufficient to account for the needs of our time. The Constitution serves us, not the other way around.