We live in dangerous times. But we are hardly the first to do so. The questions that engage us (or that should engage us) have been the subject of books and essays by great minds for centuries. Too few of us are familiar with those works.
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Category Archives: Constitution
Remember the Bill of Rights?
There I was, in a rocking chair at the nursing home, where one of my grandsons had come to visit me. The discussion turned nostalgic, as we discussed those years, long past, when I had taught college students about the Bill of Rights.
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Assault on Judges
The nation’s founders realized that judges wouldn’t always be right, but they nevertheless insisted that they be independent. In the system they created, majority rule stops where the Bill of Rights begins. If judges weren’t shielded from the political passions of the day, the founders knew the Bill of Rights would quickly become the "Set of Suggestions."
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Circles
Libertarians insist that the political spectrum is not a straight line, with "right-wingers" on one end and "left-wingers" on the other. Instead, it is a circle, where extremists on opposite poles touch?and share a desire to impose their particular brands of political correctness on the rest of us. Extremists may disagree on ideology, but they share a real fondness for authoritarianism.
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Ends and Means
If there is one clear distinction between western constitutional systems and the various dictatorships and theocracies around the globe, it is the formers’ emphasis on process. Indeed, we might justifiably characterize our Bill of Rights as a restatement of your mother’s admonition that how you do something is just as important as what you choose to do. ?The ends do not justify the means? is a fundamental American precept.
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