Apparently according to our constitutional expert "slavery does not at all violate any aspects of the bill of rights. .......
http://currenteventsii.yuku.com/sreply/ ... e-Gun-Laws

And the damn "interrupt" button isn't working so I can't even ignore him ....

Amazing ... huh? ~

Sooz

He's probably right. At least up to the time of the 17th Amendment. Neither the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights was intended to curtail slavery. The subject was hotly debated during the 1787 Constitutional Convention and it is highly likely the United States would not exist today had slavery not been protected by the Constitution.

http://www.confederatepastpresent.org/i ... ring-storm

There are probably as many interpretations of the Constitution as there are of the Bible.

Jim, surely the South, a predominently ag economy, couldn't have prospered as it did without its forced free labor. And if the 3/5 compromise hadn't been sstruck, no southern delegate would have siged the Consititution, and the nation would have started out a whole lot smaller. We'd have had the Union and the Confederacy a lot earlier.

Did slaves have the "right to bear arms" Jim?
The constitution might not have been applied fully before the 17th amendment, but that's different. They just gave the pro-slavers an apparent out.

It was politically expedient to interpret the way it was is all, and the court went along with that.

Actually Gramps a lot of economists have argued that slave labour is very inefficient. It is far more profitable to free them (with zero resources) and then employ them as piece workers on starvation wages .....

Jim, surely the South, a predominently ag economy, couldn't have prospered as it did without its forced free labor. And if the 3/5 compromise hadn't been sstruck, no southern delegate would have siged the Consititution, and the nation would have started out a whole lot smaller. We'd have had the Union and the Confederacy a lot earlier.


That may be although it is just as likely there would have been no United States. I don't know a lot about the actual strategies and tactics of the revolutionary war, but could the states who didn't care about slavery have mounted the revolution on their own? Even in what I will call 'The North", could the founders have drummed up enough support to launch the revolution if they had tried to give slaves equality in the Constitution? Still another scenario could have seen the creation of two countries instead of one right from the beginning.

No matter what could have happened, though, it is clear that the slavery issue was hotly debated by the founders and agreement reached that the new constitution did not adversely affect slavery.

As Thomas Jefferson probably put it, "My slaves are screwed."

Still another scenario could have seen the creation of two countries instead of one right from the beginning.

I think this is the most likely. Two neighboring confederations, instead of one nation. I think it could be argued that even as The United States, we were effectively two different countries.

Yep Jim. But was that agreement about content or interpretation? I suspect it was the later.

Cattleman wrote:

Yep Jim. But was that agreement about content or interpretation? I suspect it was the later.

Does it matter? The compromise was that the interpretation of the content was such that slavery was protected. It was an interpretation that appeared to have enough weight that eighty some years later it took a constitutional amendment to put it to rest.

Accepted. But I'm not the guy saying rights are "inherent".

The only inherent rights that exist are those that you can keep someone else from taking away from you.

"All men" used to mean white men who owned property. Women, other nationalities, other races, those who were not landowners, etc. were simply inferior and considered a bit less than human or not sufficiently intelligent to possess full rights. It has changed a bit since but there's still a ways to go.

That's the sort of thing I was thinking of Oskar - the accepted preconceptions of the time.

If they can be taken away they aren't "inherent" Jim. I mean, according to the source mentioned, slaves actually had all those rights, they just couldn't use them. Which, as far as I'm concerned means you don't have them ....

Well, the premise is that all people have certain rights by default, just as a consequence of being human. That's why they're called unalienable. The right exists, said Jefferson, whether or not one has the liberty to exercise it.

Ahhh, but what some people can't get their head around is that I simply don't believe that. And even if I did I wouldn't accept the US version of what those rights are.
If you can't exercise a right its because you don't have it makes a lot more sense to me.
I mean, where exactly do these rights reside???? In Jefferson's and a few other "enlightenment" thinkers imagination as far as I tell.

What "rights" does a prisoner have?

Very few Oskar ... and it very much depends WHERE they are prisoners.

As to the original point, I think that Article 6 of the US constitution pretty much makes the case:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

I'm fond of our Bill Of Rights. And ashamed that our legislators have declared some of them off limits to various people.

I can see why Gramps, but the real mistake in my mind was thinking they could be codified with any precision. They are mostly just derived from British Common Law in any case and its not codified.

this is precisely the problem with originalism. those who are not originalists like to point it out.

My point about prisoners is that those supposedly "inalienable" rights are so easily alienated. That Bill of Rights is based on a false premise.

That's my point as well Oskar. They are a myth.

No. We're talking about two different processes and documents here

The first is the Declaration, in which Jefferson asserts that people come out of the womb with rights that are default attributes of humanity, life,liberty and pursuit of happiness, et al. Because that's the way "Their Creator" set things up, end of story. Jefferson uses the word "unalienable".

The second is the Bill of Rights, which are addenda to the founding document of the country, and seeks to be more specific about those rights by specifying what human actions the new gov't may not impede...generally called speech, religion, publishing, assembly, redress etc. Also what the gov't couldn't do that would indirectly impede their freedoms...quartering troops, establishing a religion, etc. But the word "unalienable" doesn't appear in those amendments.(I'm pretty sure)

The Bill of Rights was a compromise, struck so that the Constitution might be ratified by enough states. The peculiar compromise was that those rights would not be specified before ratification, provided that they might very likely be inserted into the document afterward. Like all compromise documents, the language is very general, doesn't seek to address every situation that might arise in the future. Those guys left it up to their successors and to us to apply the general rules to specific circumstances. Eventually the Supreme Court got the task (arrogated that authority to itself).

As to the rights being a myth, Jefferson saw them as endowed by a creator, and therefore while they might be impeded by the state or others, the rights were as much a part of the human being as hands and feet and liver, hence unalienable. The writers of the amendments saw the Constitution as authority to formally recognize, and hence to codify, the named rights, and protect them from future alienation.
The rub is that your right to do A may well impede my right to do B, and we have to fight it out in court, and one of us is going to feel un-unalienable, rights-wise. The Constitution writers left that up to us and our lawyers, and while its meaning may be arguable in disputes, The Constitution's authority isn't mythical.

And your rights may be unalienable, but if there are two or more than two people on the planet, they can never be absolute.

What was the question again?