Margaret wrote:
> ...but seen in the context of their time, the Founders in general
> were quite radical.
So you think that the participants in Shay's Rebellion were just a bunch of ruffians. And seen in the context of their times they also were precisely what Dr. Johnson called them, a bunch of slavedrivers. I really cannot extend the same "historical excuse" to the savagery of slavery in 1776 that one can extend to slavery in (say) 405 b.c.e., when even the slaves had no objection to it in principle. Can there be any more hypocritical statement in all of human history than the first sentence of the Declaration.
And if the Bill of Rights was so radical, how come so many men, women and children had to die before (in the 1950/60s) the U.S. Supreme Court began regularly (if only for a while) to see it that way? What makes you think that you are so much smarter at divining "original intent" than all those federal judges over almost 200 years? Those wonderful Founding Fathers merely set the stage for what (proportionately to population) must have been one of the bloodiest wars in history to give minimal and merely formal meaning to the first sentence of the Declaration. And even when reinterpreted by all that blood, the Bill of Rights merely presided (with full Supreme Court approval) over what Mark Twain, a century ago, aptly named the United States of Lyncherdom.
Pfaugh!
Carrol