Weren’t they okay with child marriage, though, girls as young as 14 and such?
And I don’t disagree with any of what you said. That is why we have legislatures full of elected representatives to change our laws consistent with evolving societal views.
What I do disagree with is the idea that since these views are changing, that somehow our Constitution morphs itself into the mold of what SOME would like it to say.
Then, instead of having a debate in the legislature, with the consent of the people, we have unelected judges serving life terms deciding these issues, and it gives the losing side no outlet to remedy the situation, stiffling ideas.
But that’s not what I said. I didn’t say “Let’s make law like this.” What I am saying is that the founding fathers attempted to set up a framework of laws that took into account that government doesn’t know the right answer as it pertains to the private life of the individual. They might have been only been thinking of it in terms of political and religious belief, but the key thing is that they established the rule of freedom of speech based on and underlying philosophy which many wrote about. Their reasons for wanting freedom of politics and freedom of religion are not tied to those two subjects. It’s an underlying philosophy that rules our nation.
When the founding father said, “All men are created equal.” They were in no way, shape, or form thinking that women should be allowed to vote some day. But the philosophy of the thing was our law, and the philosophy is that so long as you can show yourself to be equal in ability to any other person on the planet, you have the same rights as anybody else.
What the founding fathers were, strictly, imagining has been irrelevant to most of the Supreme Court decisions that are hailed as the greatest and most just since the Constitution was fashioned. The right choice has always been to look at the philosophy of government and human rights that the founding fathers believed in and making sure that that is what our law is becoming.
You can’t hold the nation to the limits of the imagination of the people of 200 years ago. And overall, I don’t think we were expected to. They themselves established that all men were created equal, and yet left slavery standing, most of them probably realizing that they were going against their own philosophy in a blatant fashion because the time just wasn’t right yet.
In their personal writings, they offered examples of what brought them to think the way they did when they wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. If something fits those examples with no changes needed but swapping out a name or two, I think it’s easy to say that the founding fathers agree with the modern interpretation had they lived long enough and seen the changes of the world as they occurred and experienced their results, but not changed their underlying ideas of human rights and government.
Indeed.
And say that in modern day, that half of everyone has had sex before they are 16. If that’s the case, I as a 15 year old boy can not only see but also perform sexual acts on a girl of 14 and anyone who thinks this is a particularly horrible and vomit-inducing occurrence is frankly an idiot. So as a 15 year old boy, what particular difference does it make if I view pictures of naked 14 year old girls? I’m allowed to do in real life, why can’t I do it on paper and on the internet (presuming that no other person than those in the acceptable age range was involved in the production nor could ever view these images). Why can’t my girlfriend send my naughty pictures of herself without me getting a sex offender label slapped on me?
Law is intended to make sense. If it has no other basis than moral indignation, that’s a stupid law.
Personally, I’d gladly pass a new amendment to the constitution which said, “Moral indignation cannot form the basis of any law.” But, I can certainly argue that the founding fathers already established that to be so. “It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my bones”, is a (rough) quote of Thomas Jeferson, talking about freedom of religion, but you can take the paper he wrote that in, swap out some names like “homosexuality” or “blacks marrying whites” or any number of other things, and in all cases, the right answer is that moral indignation isn’t a rational basis for law in the Land of the Free.