The women's and civil rights movements went against the traditions of plenty of millennial old cultures such as the "Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs"[0] as well.

[0]http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf#p...

Don't forget that liberal madness about replacing monarchs with elected government!

1569–1795

"The Union possessed features unique among contemporary states. Its political system was characterized by strict checks upon monarchical power. These checks were enacted by a legislature (sejm) controlled by the nobility (szlachta). This idiosyncratic system was a precursor to modern concepts of democracy, constitutional monarchy, and federation."

"minority" should be replace with "individual". An individual is the greatest minority.

(edit: Holy cow this post got downvotes! If you think this is wrong please go read pretty much literally anything on the topic of the bill of rights by literally any of the founding fathers. Protecting the rights of democratic minorities was a very, very, VERY explicit goal of the bill of rights.)

"Democracy and liberty are often thought to be the same thing, but they are not. Democracy means that people ought to be able to vote for public officials in fair elections, and make most political decisions by majority rule. Liberty, on the other hand, means that even in a democracy, individuals have rights that no majority should be able to take away."

"Liberty, on the other hand, means that even in a democracy, individuals have rights that no majority should be able to take away."

"individuals have rights that no majority should be able to take away."

OP: 5 is a positive number.

jr: Correction: 5 is a number.

nm: That's a silly correction. It's more accurate to say it's a positive number, why are you correcting OP?

jr: But positive numbers are numbers!)

No, it is not an important point. It is a silly point that confuses the issue and is more wrong than right.

It is NOT accurate to say that it that the Constitution or Bill of Rights protects individual rights. They DO NOT protect individual rights. Instead, the Constitution provides for democratic self-governance bounded by some enumerated protections designed primarily to protect minorities. The hope was and is that these limited protections in tandem with democratic self-governance provide a system of government that will protect individual rights.

The Constitution and Bill of Rights is substantively and substantially different from a document that might enumerate a list of protected individual rights. Ensuring individual rights is the purpose and duty of the entire democratic process, not just the Constitution.

To make the point clearer, there are many items in the UN Declaration of Human Rights that the US recognizes (culturally) as being valid individual rights. E.g. The US provides universal access to education and the culture, on balance, recognizes access to secondary education as a fundamental right. But there is no constitutional prerogative for meeting this or other "rights" -- that's provided for legislatively. Georgia could defund its educational system tomorrow and the US Constitution wouldn't have squat to say about it.

In conclusion, the Constitution (edit)WAS NOT PRIMARILY DESIGNED TO PROTECT(/edit) individual rights. It protects primarily minority rights and provides for a system of governance that we hope will protect all individual rights.

(*edit, alternative wording for the paragraph above because jrs235 is nit-picking.)

The Constitution protects rights of individuals. It may not protect every agreed upon right. But the rights it protects belong to individuals (originally as drafted, those individuals were wealthy white land owners, not minorities like women or anyone else)!

Yes, saying "individual rights" isn't technically incorrect. But it's less accurate a protrayal than saying "minority rights".

Anyways, you're clearly ignoring the obvious intent of my posts in favor of stupid nit-picking. So I'm done.

And when the democratic process fails to protect individual rights, the Constitution, and more specifically the Bill of Rights, is the document that explicitly enumerates what the Government may absolutely not do.

Yes.

> May I ask where you received your education pertaining to the Constitution?

From a constitutional law course taught by a professor with a JD from Harvard.

Again, rights of a minority are individual rights. But it's disingeneous to say that the constitution PROTECTS individual rights in general. It does not. It protects a small subset of individual rights that are most relevant when someone is in a political/racial/religious minority. Calling these rights minority rights is more accurate than calling them indvidual rights. In addition to minority rights, the consitutiton also provides a mechanism for ensuring other individual rights -- both de facto and de jure -- are protected.

Most of the founding fathers considered freedom from unreasonable taxation a plausible individual right. The Constitution doesn't provide explicit protections against that; instead, it provides self-governance.

Here is how I viewed this exchange:

OP: 5 is a positive number.

You: 5 is a number.

Me. That's stupid. It's more accurate to say it's a positive number, why are you correcting OP?

You: But positive numbers are numbers!

Me: Yeah duh I'm done here.

Individual is more specific and accurate than minority.

This would be more accurate:

OP: The square root of a positive number is a number so the square root of a positive number times another number means it also a number.

ME: The square root of a positive number is not just number, it's a positive number.

OP: So what.

ME: It means we can conclude even more... It means the square root of a positive number times a number is the sign of the non square root number.

We typically call a person who disagrees with the majority a member of the minority.

> the majority

What majority? There are lots of majorities and lots of minorities -- one for each issue put forward to a group of citizens, and then a bunch of other cultural ones.

I doubt anyone is a member of each of those majorities. So yes, everyone needs these individual rights. But the rights were designed to protect individuals when they find themselves in the minority. So saying that the issue is individual rather than minority rights is disingenuous, confusing, and massively ahistorical. Again, many of these rights were explicitly designed to prevent violent mob rule. This issue is not up for debate. It is an historical fact. Go read what the founding fathers wrote about the Bill of rights.

I agree the founding fathers drafted the Constitution to prevent mob rule.

If a majority agrees we have freedom of speech, then we don't need the first amendment since it only protects minorities and minority opinions? The individual is the greatest minority, the Constitution protects individuals. Regardless of if an individual currently belongs to the/a majority or minority the Bill of Rights protects them.

EDIT: In other words, whether or not an individual is in the majority or minority opinion on an issue, the Bill of Rights protects the individuals to freely express their opinion. It's not as if an individual holds the majority opinion than they no longer get 1st Amendment protections. The rights belong to individuals not "minorities" (except in the sense that an individual is the greatest minority).

ADD: The founding fathers didn't care about minorities except themselves as individuals. They wrote the Bill of Rights to protect themselves individually.

It was expected that democratic self-governance would protect against other basic rights (e.g., to freedom from unreasonable taxation, the right to not be raped and murdered, etc.). But most individual rights are not listed in the Constitution, because the purpose of the constitution was to establish democratic self governance with protection for minorities against mob rule. NOT to provide for individual rights.

> What specifically can you point me to, what founding father, specifically wrote that the Bill of Rights was to protect minorities and not individuals?

Read Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural Address, for starters.

Of course rights of minorities are individual rights, since minorities are composed of individuals. But the constitution was designed specifically to protect the rights of minorities, not to protect individual rights in general. The assumption was that democratic self-governance would provide for "little-r" rights; i.e., for fir and just governance.

Because "ME" could be in the minority, whether by myself or 49.9% of the people.

I bet Jefferson didn't want to be raped. Wonder why he didn't make that an amendment? Could it have been because he figured that right could be provided in a non-constitutional setting?

Do you understand what you are saying? So if you are in the majority, the government can suppress your speech?!?!?

If you agree with a supermajority of Congress and the President on issue X, your first amendment rights to say you support issue X aren't really super important. Of course you should still have them, but they are easily protected by way of democratic processes -- constitutional provisions aren't necessary when the lawmakers are on your side.

You are jumping to the consequences of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights in particular, protecting individual rights.

Because the Constitution, the Bill of Rights in particular, protects individual rights, minority rights are protected.

> constitutional provisions aren't necessary when the lawmakers are on your side.

Except when the lawmakers are in the minority (and you being in the majority), the majority still needs protections. Since its the individuals, not minorities that are protected, the rights of the [individuals in the] majority are also protected.

The historical reality is that the rights enumerated in the amendments were designed specifically to protect minorities.

Yes, "individual rights are minority rights" implies "minotiries get rights". But if the primary purpose was individual rather than minority rights, then why in god's name aren't other more obvious individual rights (e.g., right not to be raped) enumerated as constitutional amendments? The answer is because the legislature can and will do that anyways.

Federally legislated social change pushes back the more important goals of social equality and cultural integration. These are arguably more important, as our interactions with marriage laws are a relatively minor part of our lives when compared to our interactions with other people.

The historical precedent here is clear, of course - there are no and have been no segregation laws in America for decades as a result of federal action, but you'd be silly to say that segregation does not exist in America.

As a counterpoint: Since the civil rights era, the welfare and integration of the black-skinned Americans has improved dramatically. Some argue that desegregation alienated more hearts and minds than it helped, but I've yet to see any evidence. Certainly American opinions about blacks also have changed dramatically. (But I agree that we do have a long way to go.)

> No hearts and no minds are changed as a result of the supreme court rulings, just the code powering the justice system ...

I'm not sure no hearts and minds were changed -- I suspect many will reconsider, having seen the decision of a respected institution and the direction of society -- but I agree that you can't do that by court order. But there is a very substantive change: Gay Americans now can get married!

> Some argue that desegregation alienated more hearts and minds than it helped, but I've yet to see any evidence.

It's a question that isn't easy to answer empirically, but it's not outside of the realm of possibility that we would today have a less segregated of a society if segregation had come been eradicated in each community separately and via local and state laws rather than federal action.

All that aside, I think legal equality is a worthy cause and a great victory on its own. I hope we do not forget about social equality and cultural integration as worthy causes, as well.

About 60% of US residents now support gay marriage and consider it a right, according to the polls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_of_same-sex_mar...

A lot of the "hearts and minds" you talk about are animated by "tradition", which is often code for "continuing to do the thing I grew up with". The legal code changes what people grow up with, thereby changing future hearts and minds.

Take a look at the graph of approval rates of interracial marriage:

http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Prod...

Some of the change there is changing hearts and minds. But a lot of it is just the replacement of bigoted hearts and minds with new ones.

As Max Planck wrote, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

And if that's true for science, it's much more so for cultural things like this. I think there's little point in continuing to harm GLBT families in the hopes of preserving the delicate feelings of people who were unlikely to change anyhow.

We've proven as a society that this won't happen without administrative action being taken from the top.

The legality has real consequences for people right this second, so waiting for the tide of change is absurd to ask of those that are affected.

Both fronts can be attacked simultaneously.

Though, I do agree there is a trend to pass a stopgap measure and to then pretend the problem is fixed.

Historically, it seems to be the case that when society legalizes something, and people can observe that under that new order, society doesn't crumble, societal attitudes on the morality of that thing change to reflect the reality (albeit slowly).

Consider women's suffrage. Consider no-fault divorce. Consider black men and white men being forced to serve side-by-side in WWII by the draft, then coming home to a country that still treated them unequal in the eyes of the law.

It's not a 100% consistent scenario (contrast abortion rights debate in the wake of Roe v. Wade), but the trend is for culture to adapt in the face of evidence.

This assumes that peoples' moral judgments aren't influenced by societal opinion and that societal opinion isn't influenced by laws and the opinions of its leaders/elites. That seems like a tough case to make.

Today's decision pushes back the more important goals of social equality and cultural integration.

How so?

1) A culture of segregation in the minds of part of the population AND segregative laws.

or

2) A culture of segregation in the minds of part of the population.

I would say 2 is better than 1. They already fixed part of it. And a part that was hurting a lot of people.

Or even a Constitutional Republic - as you say, we're not a mob-rule democracy.