The way people in US politics talk about the Constitution is so uncomfortably biblical. Same attitude of "all the answers to life are encoded in the text, our weaknesses stem only from our imperfect interpretations" but even more uncomfortable because the text is entirely literal and its origins well-known. We know quite well that the "Founding Fathers" were just some dudes who needed to throw together an organizational charter that wouldn't piss off the South too much. (And that many of them were, at the same time as they were doing this high-minded talk about the Rights of Man, keeping human beings as slaves. The older I get it, the more it freaks me out that pointing this out is a weird little lefty quibble and not a complete dealbreaker comparable to finding out George Washington was a cannibal.) Why do we talk about them like they had some special insight into government that has never been bested in 250 years of experience and scholarship?
...Because if we don't, it opens the floodgates for things to get even worse. As absolutely thumbsucking as it is to talk about the Bill of Rights like the exact phrasing of "a well regulated militia" appeared to us in burning letters on Mount Sinai, at least it's something we still have some amount of bipartisan agreement on. "This violates the First Amendment" is still something that requires at least a lip service excuse, whereas good luck with "this violates the moral principle of free expression." If people can only conceive of ethics in the way of "Big Man give us Special Book", at least the Constitution is a better choice than the literal Bible? But it's embarrassing that this is the intellectual level we're stuck at.
(the way people talk about the Bible is so removed from the actual text of that too, and the "literal interpretations" most of all. you ever sit down and actually read that thing? it's mostly histories and poetry and such, the parts that turn to the audience and give direct instructions are a minority of the text and mostly things that don't apply to Christians anyway.)
anyhow I gotta go to work so here's your concluding paragraph.
