this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Dude. Our constitution said black people were 3/5ths of a human.
Exactly, thanks for supporting my point.
Does it still? Or did we change the Constitution to better reflect our values?
I mean the constitution is the backbone of the system and it used to be updated, but now people treat it as this perfect monolithic unchanging thing. If any modern politician tryd to add amendments it would not go well(also Canadian here)
I agree with that. Thomas Jefferson had the right idea that the Constitution should be rewritten every generation to better reflect the people.
Maybe not that often, but certainly more than it is
Every generation sounds about right (maybe not completely rewritten, but with significant amendments).
One generation recognizes that if black people are free, they should vote. A couple generations later starts recognizing that women are people, not property, as well, and that they should have the right to vote. Then the next generation realizes that shenanigans are being used to keep people from voting, so they get make those things illegal. Then the next decides to establish 18-year-olds are adults, so they should be able to vote.
...and then they decided that things are great, gerrymandering is fine, skewing the voting to benefit the party in power should be within the powers of the states, and outright ignoring a public vote is perfectly reasonable in a democracy, so the constitution should be treated as a complete, unalterable document, since we apparently got it right now.
And that's just voting. I definitely think we could use some changes based on this new generation (gender/orientation protection, voting rights, etc).
I've long thought that every amendment and major law needs an expiration date upon which time the current legislative body is forced to vote to uphold it or let it expire.
We shouldn't have these because we have sanctified them, we should have them because we still believe in them. If we don't believe in them anymore, they need to go.
It was only enslaved people that were counted at 3/5ths. Free blacks were counted as a whole person.
From Wikipedia:
So it's technically still in there, but moot with slavery being banned.
Slavery isn't banned in the US lol
Is it only the 19th ammendment which allows it, or someplace else as well?
13th amendment
Does it still say you're allowed to use slavery for punishment as a crime? Do you still do that for non violent offenders? Does your country have more non violent offenders than any country to ever exist? Your country started with shit values and continues to push its shit values onto the rest of the world.
Changing the Constitution is the whole problem.
It desperately needs updating but it's become this sacred text that cannot be changed and all future laws must be based on asinine interpretations of the ancient texts
Id argue the original document had awful clauses and every entry has at least one defect. Its so "sacred" that mistakes are costly. Still worth attempting, just a "you better know what your doing" situation.
caugh prisoners are not given protection under our anti-slavery ammendment, caugh and our prisons are kept full caugh
So our values can change over time? How do we know which values to live up to?
What a strange question. Of course they can and they do, all the time.
Then what makes a value an American value?
Usually "country's values" are something the state or the population publicly (claim to) hold. Another perspective is what others view as their values.
It's not a clear cut thing at all. Americans often use terms like "freedom, liberty, democracy", stuff like that so I'm thinking from their pov those are their values.
Money.
Money is the only truly American value, everything else can be discussed about depending on how much money is involved.
I use the Declaration of Independence's preamble as a good baseline:
I see. So one of our values is given to us by a god. That's what we have to live up to? A god's values? That's American? I don't even believe in a god.
And why is the Declaration, something that happened before America existed as a nation, the thing to look to and not the Constitution?
You have a lot of catching up to do in school. The declaration and constitution heavily pull for Locke’s Treatises of Government and even older texts. It is not necessarily speaking to a god. In fact Locke brings up Spinoza in making this point. It is moreso that we exist in a universe that functions with certain parameters that are the baseline for our current situation. It’s very generalized. Basically, Locke’s philosophy, which was inherited by the framers of the declaration/ constitution/BoR was that civil society only exists as an agreement among people in order to better their quality of life. If it does not live up to these expectations, people can abandon government and go back to less civil times. Government helps prevent the breakdown of discourse with war being the ultimate opposite of civil society. Basically, the government exists by the people and for the people. The Declaration of Independence is an important founding document in US history for many different reasons, but one of them that is of importance is that is marks the foundation for a unified set of values that would be further codified in the follow-up documents. It was made very clear to all present that when the Constitution was drafted, it would have fast-follow amendments and then continue to in order to reflect the basic foundational values as society and technology progressed over time. This flexibility was intentionally added. The founding documents don’t speak much about the financial system. That came later.
Of course, they change overtime, do you want to respect the rules written in the Old Testament?
We educate the people to free thinking, and then we ask them to vote, that's how democracy is supposed to work. It's not perfect, and it has ups and downs, but we do have made some progress considering the past centuries.
No, I want to find out what American values we're supposed to live up to, not what Iron Age Jewish values we're supposed to live up to. What are they and what makes them American values?
I think they come from the European Humanism and Enlightenment, they are not American specific. Equality in rights and opportunities, social liberalism, economical liberalism, religious/origin tolerance, rationality, democracy.
What makes those our values? I don't see anything in our founding documents that reflect things like equality in rights and opportunities or social liberalism or economic liberalism.
If you want to acknowledge religious tolerance as described in the Bill of Rights, you also have to acknowledge the 3/5ths compromise.
As far as rationality or democracy, those have never been American values.
Aren't the 18th century human rights part of the early documents or referenced in it?
Sure. And those documents include saying black people are 3/5ths of a person. You can ignore that if you like, I guess.
I'm not ignoring that, I'm trying to answer.
Those documents are major improvements, but there are still not completely extracted from their historical context. For example, the French "Men Rights" willingly ignored the mention of women, despite feminists campaigning for it. Even if some of the influences were impressively progressive philosophers, they were all still pretty damn sexist, which was the norm at this time.
There's no absolute truth for values, people who think there is, are religious people. Best we can do is finding a consensus, the modern Human Rights is the best we have, I think.
There's some overlap between the two.
I think what makes something some country's values is either the government publicly adopting or enough of the population doing so. That doesn't mean anyone is actually living up to those values. Might not even be trying.
And then there's the question, their values from whose perspective? Americans might say thing X is their value but outsiders might look at them and conclude their value is Y. So there's no one set of coherent values that hold true from all perspectives.
So if Trump wins and the government adopts fascism, those are American values?
Assuming the population adopts those values, yes I'd say so. That's how those values change.