THE VERY core of the government of the United States of America is under attack. These attacks are not coming from disgruntled citizens or terrorists from another country, but from the nine judge council that sits at the head of the judicial branch of our government.
In the recent weeks, the Supreme Court has made some rather large, sweeping changes to the Constitution, "updating it" to the modern age. Most of these changes were never intended by the founding fathers and appear nowhere in the original text. The modern leftist ideal of a "living, breathing Constitution" is a dangerous one indeed. When the Constitution can be broadly reinterpreted at any point in time, the outline that it creates is subject to be simply re-evaluated on a whim by the majority.
The Court caved to a growing public pressure and recently wrote that term of "diversity" is a compelling interest for colleges and universities. It was not only decided by a panel of judges that it was OK for public institutions to make decisions based partially on race, but more importantly, fundamentally changed the nature of race in reference to the Constitution. Before the Court handed down this decree, the Constitution, and thus our government, handled the issue of race in a very clear way; the race of a person was not an issue with respect to the government. Between the Civil Rights Act and the various Constitutional amendments, it was made quite clear that race had no place as a deciding factor in government proceedings.
Suddenly the Court has announced that "promoting diversity" is a compelling interest of the government. There is no mention of this term "diversity" in any other part of the Constitution, but it is suddenly at the forefront of modern constitutional debate. At issue is not if the Court was correct in making this decision, but the precedent setting manner in which it was decreed. The Constitution is to be amended by Congress and the states, not by the high court.
In another case, the high court struck down a rarely enforced ban on sodomy in the state of Texas. While the implications of the ruling will likely not affect the day to day enforcement of the law in the state of Texas, it does bring to light a significant question; where did this ruling come from? Instead of striking down the ban on homosexual sodomy because it did include all forms of sodomy, the Court simply announced that the government was not within its rights to restrict sexual activities in any sense. Essentially the Court has pulled out of thin air a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to sexual liberty. Similar to the case of Roe v Wade, the court has added to the supreme law of the land at the whim of public opinion.
When the Constitution was written and the Bill of Rights completed, the founders penned the now famous words for a particular reason. When the founders wrote that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed, they were being exceptionally clear that the people of the new nation would be allowed to bear arms. This fallacy that the document can change with the times simply does not fit; there is no little asterisk next to the second amendment stating that once the weapons are large enough the amendment ceases to apply or that once few enough people hunt for food that weapons could suddenly become illegal.
This concept of a living Constitution is especially dangerous because it is inherently not democratic in nature. The illusion that these decisions are being handed down by some sort of majority of the people is an easy one to fall into. These judges are there to clarify the meaning of the original constitution, not add phrases pertaining to "diversity," "marital privacy" and "sexual freedom" to it.
The founders of our nation intended the process of amending the Constitution to be very long and difficult. The point of the arduous ratification process of an amendment was to ensure that the pros and cons of it had been debated and discussed on every level. An amendment can take years to decades to go through the process, and this is a good thing as we will not find bits of text randomly added to our country's most sacred document.
The men who founded our country knew what they were doing. It is quite evident, if solely by the fact that our country has stood the test of time as a beacon of freedom in this sometimes dark world. If there really needs to be a marital right to privacy or a guarantee of sexual freedoms or major restriction on owning guns in this country it needs to come down through the proper channels; not by the decree of a nine judge panel. The Constitution of this country is a solid legal document, and a very fine one at that. It is not a living organism that changes with the tide of public opinion.
(Daniel Bagley is a Cavalier Daily columnist. He can be reached at dbagley@cavalierdaily.com.)
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