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I am not American, but does not the preamble to your Constitution guarantee, among other things, the right to the pursuit of happiness to all citizens?
This being the case, how can a section of your political classes deny that right to another section of your citizenry?
Why hasn't someone lodged a case to protest this abrogation of rights to the Supreme Court?
Comments
Uh, No...
"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" were "unalienable rights" described in the Declaration of Independence.
They're not in the Constitution.
Here's the preamble:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Eric
To follow up on Eric’s point . . .
The Declaration of Independence does not create enforceable rights. Its principles are operationalized through the Constitution. Most importantly, the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees that no person shall be deprived of certain foundational rights “without due process.” However, the rights enumerated in the Fourteenth Amendment are “life, liberty and property.” This is the older Lockean formulation rather than the articulation in the Declaration of Independence, and “property” substitutes for the “pursuit of happiness.”
Emma
Republic V Democracy
The USA was designed as a Republic. After our forefathers hammered out the Constitution Benjamin Franklin was asked as he came out, “Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?” “A Republic, if you can keep it."
Civics is one of the courses removed from school along with history and God. If one doesn't understand nor care how our government is supposed to work than politicians may and can do anything they want. If one wanted to understand how bad it is, look at the number of cases filed in court now as our system is no longer following the Constitution and every executive decree, every law has to be debated in court.
Our system is broken as greed and corruption has become the driving force of our politicians and laws. There are those now capable of passing laws to control every aspect of a citizen's life even if they have no idea what it takes to do that person's job. Pass a law and it must be even if physics and nature disagree.
To answer you post, if enough laws are passed against treating transsexuals then eventually there will be no transgender. They only exist because they think they are and can find medicines and doctors to support that idea. Politicians pass these laws without ever reading any medical research papers on why transgender happens? I hesitate to call it a birth defect but that's the closest I can come to an example.
If it's legislated out of existence and not supported it doesn't exist is the mindset.
Remember Republic not Democracy? Our nation is supposed to be ruled from the bottom up not from the top down. We failed to keep it as the public lost interest in what those in government do.
Hugs Joanne
Barb
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
if enough laws are passed...
Barbie, I think that you meant to say:-
To answer you post, if enough laws are passed against treating transsexuals then eventually there will be no openly transgender, gay, lesbian or bisexual in the USA
We will continue to exist and even thrive outside the US. Inside, we will just go back into the closet until this lot of crazies have left office.
Mind you if MTG has her way, there will be large parts of the country that will be a sanctuary for anyone on the LGBTQ+ spectrum.
Samantha
I always wonder why so many
I always wonder why so many people refer to America as a democracy when it is a federal republic.
https://mewswithaview.wordpress.com/
It’s complicated. . . .
The founding generation only used the term “democracy” to describe a form of government where all the voters debate and vote on all the laws directly. They used the term “republic” to denote a form of government where people elect representatives who pass the laws. They very much believed, however, that the representatives should be elected by the people (though they debated the limits of the franchise extensively, and individual state practices varied widely). In today’s parlance, we might describe the arrangement as a representative democracy rather than a direct democracy.
Unfortunately, people in America today who seek to restrict voting rights and exacerbate the non-majoritarian aspect of the system like to say “it’s a republic, not a democracy,” like the label is a magic wand. The drafters of the Constitution allowed certain non-majoritarian elements as a compromise (equal representation of states in the Senate being the biggest example), but these were necessary evils, not positive goods.
Emma
Liberty's blind spots (with a guest appearance by Philip Wylie)
Even the best countries fall short of their ideals; all it takes is a little fear mongering and a failure on the part of the courts to keep a (more or less) democracy from turning into a mobocracy and legislating away the rights of certain citizens. Or from not considering certain groups of humans citizens (or humans) at all. I wouldn't call you naive, Joanne. We've talked a lot + you seem to know the score; you just wish people were better at living by their purported principles...
During World War Two Philip Wylie wrote a book called GENERATION OF VIPERS; in which he forwarded the shocking opinion that there was nothing in the American character that made us any different than the Germans we were fighting, or that would prevent us from committing evil on the scale of the Nazis. For stating such an unpatriotic idea many people howled for his head on a pike; until President Truman praised the book, saying every American should read it. It's quite a read, a totally audacious critique of our society that it would be hard to place on a right/left spectrum (and not really a libertarian either; although his take-no-prisoners rhetorical style will remind you of Heinlein), with opinions I loved and agreed with and others I loathed- like Wylie's virulent misogyny; and for some reason he really, really, really, really, really had it in for Moms! Weird guy and all his books are interesting, spanning a range from Sci-fi to social realism to the absurdist experimental fiction of Finnley Wren. And how the hell did this turn into a book review?
~hugs, Veronica
What borders on stupidity?
Canada and Mexico.
.
After The Comments
Let's see if I have it right:-
The USA has a fundamental principle that declares that all its citizens have the right to pursue happiness and this is an INALIENABLE right.
The actual Laws of the USA do not support this right (they don't even mention it) and any individual State can enact legislation that specifically countermands and/or undermines the inalienable right of its citizens to pursue happiness.
Have I got that correct?
I mean, yes. BUT.
When the US was founded, the entire 13 colonies that would form the initial states had a combined population of 2.5 million people (recorded) spread out between them, and occupied an area not much bigger than the state of Texas when combined. On top of that they got an additional amount of land a little over that same amount further west, between the colonies and the Mississippi, from the British. All told, states and territories were about 30k square miles bigger in area than Alaska and Texas combined. Elections were on a long delay -- confirmations taking months -- because of the difficulty of communications, and it was largely assumed that the states that made up the country weren't so much parts of a whole as individual micronations in a UN-esque conglomerate for safety. That would change eventually, largely thanks to the events of the Civil War, but state sovereignty was long considered an essential part of the American machine, or at the very least was treated as though it were.
This was the thinking at the time of the Constitution being written, and the Declaration of Independence, and even through the formation of the Bill of Rights and many other amendments the Constitution would see for some time, one where freedom was as simple as fleeing into the massive territorial frontier, and where sometimes something as simple as crossing state lines could mean a total erasure of your entire history if you pleased.
At least, in theory.
The US Constitution is a living document for this very reason. The US deserves a lot of crap for a lot of what it's done, and how it's tried to justify it, but one thing the founding fathers were pretty savvy about was recognizing that the way the world was when they founded the nation wasn't how the world would be 50, 100, or 250 years down the line, and that the Constitution would have to change with it. That's a big part of the reason why the vast majority of what the Constitution itself says is more or less really broad, and it's later amendments that get into the nitty gritty details.
If you want a better sense of what rights are typically considered truly foundational to the US, the Bill of Rights (the first handful of constitutional amendments) are considered the true foundational document for establishing the basics of the US's freedoms. Many of them are STILL very vague, either due to the archaic language used or, once again, because they're intentionally written relatively broadly to allow for changing interpretations in a changing nation, but they provide a clearer picture of what was seen as essential for a healthy nation than either the Constitution itself or the Declaration of Independence, and are what most often both come under attack and are used as defense when people talk about quote-unquote "inalienable" rights. If you're looking to establish an idea of what that bill of rights actually entails currently, it's probably better to ignore most of the political discourse in the US and look purely at the text as written and laws/cases that have been decided based on that text and that are considered to set legal precedent, and formulate your own conclusions. Do so with consideration of the time(s) the documents were written and the case(s) happened, and you should have a better foundational understanding of the US than most folks who live here do.
I did my best to write this comment in as neutral a way as I could. That said, I would urge everyone who's participated in this thread, and may do so in the future, to please keep the site's rules in mind. This is a subject that can very, *very* easily get out of hand and breach any of the site's 3 major rules, so please keep that in mind.
Thank you.
*hugs*
Melanie E.
With some caveats, I’d say your summary is correct.
But I’d also say it’s not all that surprising.
The United States was founded on principles of what was called “ordered liberty.” It’s a nice phrase, but contains ideals that are — that must be — in dynamic tension. The foundational documents are based on Enlightenment principles, but those principles recognize the same dynamic tension between the rights of every individual to choose their own path, on the one hand, and the right of the people, collectively, to choose the laws by which their society is governed.
Our constant debates about the scope of individual rights relates more to this inherent tension with self-government than they do with whether the phrase “pursuit of happiness” is contained in the text of the Constitution or a statute. Operationally, the “pursuit of happiness” is indistinguishable from a liberty interest protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Yet, all rights protected by the Constitution, including the ones that are most clearly articulated (“Congress shall pass no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech”), are subject to limiting principles and reasonable regulations. One way to understand U.S. Constitutional Law is simply a long and evolving dialogue about when, whether and how communities can limit peoples’ freedom to do whatever they want.
I’ll stop. I’ve tried to keep it neutral, Melanie, and I hope I haven’t offended anyone or violated any of the site’s most excellent rules — rules which are, themselves, foundational efforts to create a space for ordered liberty. Joanne, I could go on forever on the subject if you let me. If you want to “talk” more, PM me. (I’ll understand if you don’t :-) ).
Hugs,
Emma
Emma