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.