Edited on 06-02-2023
How affects our individual rights and personal lives under the under the Roberts Court based on the 511 nouns used in the US Constitution
Draft – work-n-progress, read at your own risk!
06-02-2023 *** stopped working @ 6:39 pm
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The Constitution’s list of individual rights is extraordinary short and leaves out more than it includes!
Based on each of the 4,543 words — particularly the nouns and idea-words — the logical conclusion is the US Constitution created an impersonal system of democratic governance modeled on the democratic principles used successfully by the ancient Greeks, Romans and highly-regarded English system going back to the Magna Carta in 1203, which established a Parliamentary system of representational government.
But of those 4,543 words and 511 nouns, the word “right” appears only once and that is in the word “copyright“.
In regard to the personal or individual “right” or “rights” of individual American of either gender, neither of those words appear. Neither are the words individual, woman, women, female (find full sentence in other essays and copy to here).
The framers of the Constitution did a masterful job of creating a democratic republic as a system of self-governance that included “separation of government powers“, “checks and balances“, elections of our chief executive and VP, all 535 Congressional representatives and a judicial branch jointly appointed by the president and consent of the US Senate.
However, the purpose of the Constitutional Convention — officially to rewrite the Article of Confederation — was to create a governmental structure for a democratic republic.
That had virtually nothing to do with the “natural law” and “nature rights”, which is what most people define as our right to exist, to control our own bodies, to think our own thoughts, and as long as we did not harm other, to be left alone.
For member of the female gender, that includes the right not to be enslaved, not to be raped, not to be forced into prostitution, and not to be forced to become or remain pregnant when that puts us in an untenable position and we have the safe and legal option of terminating the pregnancy at a non-viable stage.
Abigail Adams’ request of her husband as president to
Not forget the ladies” went totally unheaded by the Founding Fathers when it came the Constitution. The reason was not sexism but the simple fact that their job was to create a working government that it was hoped would somewhere down the road be sure to “not forget the ladies”.
But the response by the current Roberts Court, so clearly expressed in the Dobbs “f*** you” decision, was to smugly, as aristocrats who are “above it all”, basically tell the states that the Constitution and Bill of Rights no longer applies to girls and women. State are free to pass laws that regulate what happend in the uterus of each adolescent girl and women of childbearing age.
While the United States fought and won its war of independence from England, all the Founding Fathers had in an earlier era been British citizens and proud of England’s long tradition of a country under Aristotle’s concept of “rule of law”.
in which the Parliment — not its king — had final authority. This amazing tradition, which trance back to the Magna Carta signed by King John in 1215, was unique in the world, both for its .
to be a country under under”rule of law“. As noted in Articles 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6 of the Constitution, all citizens and legal residents regardless of social status (with the current exception of Supreme Court Justices!) are bound by laws that are publicly accessible, independently arbitrated, and equally enforced and both included habeas corpus” and trial by a jury of one’s peers.
The last two — habeas corpus and trial by jury — were a hot topic for the all-male world of politically-active American colonists. In the two decade before our war for independence (1763-75), George III considered American colonists to be disloyal insurrectionists, so the many political activists recognized today as our “founding fathers”, faced a constant barrage of strong-arm tactics by British soldiers.
Colonists who spoke out in public or printed “seditious” materials were arrested by British soldiers and thrown in jail. These prisoners were then held for months without any legal evidence of a crime — i.e. no habeas corpus or ‘produce the dead body‘ or comparable evidence — and no jury trial to punish the guilty and free the innocent.
As full British citizens, the American colonists were outraged to have their very own government deny them the elegantly-stated civil rights ensconced in centuries of English law that went back to the Magna Carta. This issue was the core reason for fighting the Revolutionary War — a demand by British-American colonists to either have their considerable civil rights as English citizens respected (i.e. having the British-American colonies be governed by duly elected British-American colonists), or to become fully independent from the government of England, which had become hostile and vindictive towards its own citizens.
When trying to understand the US Constitution as it applies to us today, it’s helpful to see it in the light of the historical events that preceded our independence from the British Empire and in regard to the fact that slavery was a legal institution from 1608 to 1865 and the abuse of power based on non-white skin color continued to be ipso facto legal in Southern states during the “Jim Crow” period from 1870 to passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965. Unfortunately, the passage of such cannot and has not eliminates personal prejudice, racial bias and gratuitous violence.
Unfortunately the list of rights memorialized in our Constitution (noted above) is brief, while what it did not acknowledge, grant, or protect is very long. The Constitution uses up more words defending the “privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it” than any other protected rights that would apply to us as individuals.
Not included in the Constitution, written during the era of slavery, was the sanctity of human life — the right of a person to not be “purchased” as a piece of “property” and enslaved as a non-person that the slave owner could legally work to death or kill outright without any legal recourse, as the crime ‘murder’ applied only to people and not to humans as “property”.
The Constitution contains no language that prevents discrimination against American citizens based on their gender, race, religion or economic status.
The Constitution also did not acknowledge or protect the natural right of a free people to own their personal lives by having control over the integrity of their physical bodies. The US Constitution does not contain a single word that acknowledges a natural or legal right to say “no” to child marriage, forced marriage or acknowledge the right to marry a partner of the same sex, a right to say “no” to unwanted sexual activity or to permit a woman of childbearing age to use abstinence or contraceptives to prevent an untenable pregnancy.
Last but certainly not least, there isn’t a single word that recognizes the basic human right to not be forced to become a mother by acknowledging a woman’s right to safely and legally terminate an untenable pregnancy prior to the stage of viability. Based on the words printed in the US Constitution, persons living in the United States are not a “free people”. Without inclusion of the Bill of Rights, slavery is still “constitutional” as is ownership of married women by their husbands, and has been asserted as recently a 25 years ago, husbands cannot be prosecuted for raping their wives because legally the wife must surrender to the sexual demands of their husband, so spousal rate is not a crime.
The US Constitution is an organizational Flow Chart for impersonally running a democratic government at the national level with little or nothing to say about our personal rights as individuals.
Have identified what the US Constitution is not — a definer and defender of individual rights — we now can appreciate what is and what it does well, which is of very elegant organization flow chart for running a national government under a bureaucratic system of democratically-elected and appointed officials and federal employees.
Based on the 511 nouns and concepts in the US Constitution is functionally a blueprint or ‘flow chart’ for a representative democracy based on three independent branches of government that exercises their legal and political powers separately. This depends on a system of national elections that provide an opportunity for its citizens to choose, via majority vote, the president of the United States and the individuals who will represent the interests of their state or district in the US Congress.
The third branch of the federal system is the Supreme Court. Unlike the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, the nine justices do not participate in the electoral system. Instead the Constitution authorises the president to choose the justices that will sit on Supreme Court, but the president’s appointments must first be approved by a majority vote of the US Senate.
What the Constitution quite obviously is not is a comprehensive document that addresses or defines every aspect of human existence — physical, sexual, social, religious, economic or political — within the legal territory of the United States. The 511 nouns or “objects of discussion and determinations” chosen in 1787 is just a tiny sliver of the many millions of words in the English language. that are not in it, persons living in the United States are not a “free people”.
It’s about the who, what, when and how of these three branches of government in relation to concepts such as “separation of powers” and “checks and balances”. It was never about granting or protecting individual freedoms, but always was laser focused on running of a large and diverse country as a democracy.
When Supreme Court Justice Alito wrote the Dobbs decision, he in essence claimed that the rule of law in the United states is based on the words that appear in the US Constitution. Since the word “abortion” was not in the Constitution, then abortion has no “constitutional” protection of any sort so states legislatures are free to pass laws making abortion illegal. By categorizing abortion to be a criminal act, laws can be passed that make it a crime to help a girl or woman obtain an abortion — giving her a phone number, driving her to an appointment, or as healthcare practitioner, providing a prescription for a drug like misoprostol.
Looking to our Constitution as the “end all” and “be all” of our human rights as American citizens is like an airplane pilot reading the schematic drawing and parts list for a Boeing 707 for take-off and landing instructions. While the original schematic will always be vital to the maintenance of the aircraft, the active verbs of flying it come from a very different mind-set.
The United States Constitution is a blueprint for a democratic process that can and should be use to govern a representative democracy. From that standpoint, our Constitution is an extraordinary gift to Americans of every generation since its signing on September 17th, 1787. But if we an individuals, or as elected or appointed officials of the federal government look to the Constitution to as the official source for defining our rights and obligations as human beings and American citizens, we simply will not find what we seek. That the Constitution, for all its virtues, did not include any systematic definition of our rights as individual citizens and legal residents. Period.
While it cannot be definitively proved, we do know that undeniable fact of slavery as an American institution was lurking in the mind every delegate. Those from the South were determined to fight to the death for the right to a life-style made possible by slave labor, while those from the northern states would do almost anything to end slavery as a legal practice.
Unfortunately, the capture and enslavement of Africans by agents for the southern states was officially acknowledged in the US Constitution as legal the passage of the “3/5th compromise” when it was by passed by a majority vote by the Constitutional delegates.
Functionally, the “3/5th compromise” was a way to keep a relative balance in congressional representation between northern, non-slave holding states and southern slave-holding states. The total number of representatives from each state in the Congress was based on their population. If each slave was counted as a person, representation in the US Senate and House of Representatives would be overwhelming from Southern slave states. If slaves weren’t counted at all, the South would be overwhelmed by the number of representative from northern states.
Hence the “3/5th Compromise”. The delegates from all the Southern states made it plain that without that “comprise”, they would all leave, never to return. The fact and fate of the United States of American hung by a slender thread. If it broke, the entire Revolutionary War would be for naught.
What passage of the provision actually “compromised” was our most basic moral and legal principles -“thou shalt not kill”, that human life is ‘sacred’, that we are admonished to “love one another” and “don’t do to others what you would not want done to you”.
This compromise was the espoused basis of our democracy, but it was not the real foundation of American society. The reason is plain enough — it sat atop the acceptance of slavery as legal and the voluntary cooperation with slaveholders by northern states which arrested and returned runaway slaves as the property of their “masters”. In practical terms, that describe a legal relationship in which one human being “purchases” another human being, and is said to “own” that human being as a piece of his or her personal ‘property’. As personal property, they legally can use, misuse, and even kill that person simply because the actual fact of humanness as been erased as full as dropping an atomic bomb.
After a swallowing that big black lie and then making it the basis for our social norms, a century of racial segregation as A-OK. At a personal level, it becomes OK to cheat, beat, sexually abuse, rape and kill other people if they are black, female, an immigrate, a member of the ‘wrong’ religion or wrong political party, or a convicted prisoner.
Ever since our Founding Fathers voted “yea” for the 3/5th compromise, which obviously seemed like the best of two evils, the United States has been a house of straw built on shifting sands.
One can make a very compelling argument against that choice, that based on ethical principles, they should have stood their ground and “let the pieces fall where they may“. Its very likely than not, the country we call the “United States of America” simply would never have existed. But we will never know if this “gift”
Cosmic pay-back for that one moral lapse — constitutional acknowledgement that legally enslaved populations are ‘property’ and not ‘persons’
