If I can ask, why? We have plenty of Muslims around here, and they go about their business in headscarves often, and we even see men wearing the occasional galabiyya, here in the 2nd largest Texas city. I went to college with a couple of hijab wearing girls at Texas A&M, not known for tolerance, and nobody that I’m aware of ever gave them a hard time or even said anything negative.
We’re not nearly so intolerant as the news would make you think; that stuff is news because it’s so uncommon, you know.
Nitpick: the right to a jury in criminal cases is in Amendment VI, while the jury right in Amendment VII is for civil trials (“suits”). Your comment on Amendment VII addresses criminal cases.
Wow…that’s kind of an old article there. Got anything more recent? Like this or this or…?..well, the list is endless actually and you can easily Google 'Muslim attacks in <pretty much any western European nation> and get your own long list.
In case the OP hasn’t gotten it so far, the BoR is not anything special in the US constitution. It’s just the first 10 amendments. It was never meant to be an exhaustive list, and it has been added to 17 times since it’s adoption, and interpreted more broadly than it had been in the past I don’t know how many times by the SCOTUS.
The idea that it represents some static relic of the 18th century is simple ignorance about what the US constitution is and how it is meant to change over time.
I’m happy you Europeans have your own way of doing things, and you’re welcome to it. Our system seems to be working well enough that more Europeans immigrate here than vice versa.
Someone should tell that to all the immigrant Muslim women in hijabs that I routinely saw around campus at my previous university. Muslims are in general much better integrated in society in America than in countries like the UK or France.
Incidentally, last I checked most of the (tiny) number of French women wearing full burqa attire were white French converts, not immigrants.
They’re almost certainly isolated attacks by ignorant and/or unbalanced people. Sikhs are welcome around here- I live a couple of miles from a rather large Gurdwara (for Texas anyway) in fact. They don’t hide it either.
It seems to me that both have strengths and weaknesses. The US Constitution is slow to change and in some ways outdated, but in Europe we’re not as respectful of freedom of speech as I’d like. 99.9% of the time it’s enough, but outlawing of Holocaust denial, for example, is ridiculous. I also dislike the UK’s established religion, but still prefer the de jure power of religion here to the de facto power it wields in the US.
What are you hoping to achieve by this, Pjen? I suppose we might all come away with a greater awareness of the flaws in our respective political systems, after everyone gets defensive and picks as many holes in their opponents’ preferred legislation as possible.
I remember lots of readers and viewers of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo being shocked that in Sweden journalists could actually be jailed for libel.
It’s also worth noting that while the POV of the book is that it’s wrong to jail the main character for it, there’s never a suggestion, including from various journalists that there’s anything wrong with having such a thing.
I’ll admit nearly pissing myself laughing at the idea that violent attacks on Muslims or the harassment of Muslims is more likely in the US than the UK.
Granted, the UK is better than France or Germany.
I can’t imagine having mobs of bigoted whites storming a Muslim restaurant in any major city in the US the way these animals were allowed to do so.
I disagree with that…but I do agree with your earlier point, that many of us consider U.S. Federalism a feature, not a bug. I’m also glad that the constitution is so very damn hard to amend. Sure, it denies me some amendments I might want…but it also denies the extremist wingnuts the amendments they want. Good trade-off.
Yes, if the Bill of Rights were the only rights guaranteed Americans and they were considered exactly the same as they were in the 18th century when the amendments were passed I think it’d be a grave problem. But instead, they are just a list of specific enumerated rights, our constitution makes it clear we retain all of our “natural rights” that we have no specifically ceded to government. We have a supreme court that has done a decent job of fleshing this out.
I have brought a lot of criticisms to bear on the Federal Constitution, but the way intrinsic rights are handled is one thing our government has done pretty well since the 1860s legally, and since the 1960s de facto. Yes, rights were violated heavily in the South, but those were all essentially illegal/unconstitutional acts that we refused to recognize as such due to racism. I’m not sure what any enumeration of rights really means if all the government actors involved are willing to ignore them (which was required for Jim Crow to exist as it did.)
That being said I think it’s more important that States have local management authority than I think it important they have so much legislative power. I’m a fan of Hamilton’s plan of government which would have curtailed many powers of the States while leaving them as independent administrative entities. There are lots of national standard laws we could really use–like a uniform criminal code or educational system, that we don’t have because of the design of the country. We do have some promulgated codes (common core, and recommended penal code type stuff) but the States cannot be forced to implement them.
The only real problem with Hamilton’s plan was it never would have been ratified, since we know that the actual Constitution we got was a compromise it’s safe to bet it’s probably about the only form it could have taken that would have been ratified and brought into power.
Where we really missed the boat is after the Civil War I think, that was a time ripe to basically create a whole de novo constitution, but it just wasn’t done.
