Along those lines, the drafters of the original Constitution, had no
> intention of considering Black or Native American suffrage and the drafters
> of the Fourteenth Amendment pretty clearly had no intention of considering
> women's suffrage or gay rights or... why the hell would anyone on the left
> treat such arguments as even potentially intelligent?
What "arguments" are you dismissing? All I've seen you mention are, unlike the Constitutional interpretation I paraphrased, widely-known and largely undisputed historical facts. Surely you don't mean to suggest that we would be better off ignoring them, perhaps pretending that the Constitution is a revolutionary socialist manifesto? And in what possible sense is knowing or citing them less "intelligent" than, say, familiarity with the Code of Hammurabi or the Magna Carta?
> Myself, I'm much more
> likely to see arguments which deal with materialist histories, standpoint
> epistemologies and situated knowledges as intelligent.
>
Perhaps that's why you're a sociologist and not a Constitutionalist? And again, you use the word "intelligent" rather strangely.
-- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað."