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The Declaration of Independance- some scholars say we've been reading it wrong.

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TaoPhoenix:
Excellent point. :Thmbsup:
-40hz (July 08, 2014, 12:09 PM)
--- End quote ---

"The error, according to Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., concerns a period that appears right after the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the transcript, but almost certainly not, she maintains, on the badly faded parchment original. "

So maybe it's a "very bad point"?
:P

MilesAhead:
The thing that cracks me up is many people think the section that goes
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,...

is part of the Constitution.  They think the Constitution was written to guarantee individual rights rather than delineating the governmental setup.  I tell them if the purpose of the document was to proclaim individual rights the "Bill of Rights" would not be amendments.  They would be right near the start like in the Declaration. Unfortunately for us the Constitution is the document that binds, not the DOI.  Joe Sixpack has heard the "self evident" part so often he just thinks that's what keeps the cops in check.  :)

CWuestefeld:
The thing that cracks me up is many people...
-MilesAhead (July 08, 2014, 05:04 PM)
--- End quote ---

I don't understand why we celebrate Independence Day as the birth of the USA. All this holiday marks is when we started trying to break away from England. But we weren't successful with becoming independent for several more years, and the form that our country now takes wasn't solidified until the ratification of the Constitution in 1789.

In a sense, the Constitution was written to guarantee individual rights. The reason that stuff is relegated to the BoR is that the individual rights was so fundamental a foundation, that it was simply assumed. The Constitution documents a limited set of powers that the people cede to the government; obviously it therefore guarantees anything not mentioned therein to the people - they never gave away those rights!

There was a fair amount of controversy over the BoR, not because anyone disagreed with its intent, but because there was a fear that (even with the 9th Amendment trying to explain the situation) the list would be taken to be inclusive, and the government would just start doing things that the list doesn't explicitly forbid. And this is exactly what has happened.

Renegade:
As others have noted, I can't see how the presence or absence of that punctuation has any real effect on the meaning.

I don't think that there's any doubt about where the heads of the founders were at - folks like Jefferson and Franklin, who wrote it, or Madison who wrote much of the Constitution were very much interested in the (classical) liberal ideology, as in the writing of JS Mill. Their philosophy was all about the sovereignty of the individual, and were not of a communitarian bent.

You might not like that, you might think that we've learned better since then, but the body of writing from these guys is pretty clear, and it's nutty to believe that a single punctuation mark, whose impact escapes most of us anyway, should be taken to contradict all that.
-CWuestefeld (July 08, 2014, 11:57 AM)
--- End quote ---

While many people can actually read and understand, there is a segment of the population that reads and invents. e.g. You say ABC, and they'll say that you said XYZ. I'm sure you've run across them before. They read what they want to.

Given how the entire SOPA/PIPA/etc. thing went -- i.e. people scream, it gets trashed, a new version with a different name comes out -- I think we can reasonably expect a new magical redefinition of the "living document" to emerge.

So, while I'd agree with you that it certainly is nutty... I fully expect at some point in the future for this to become an issue with a new "interpretation"... because war is peace.

Vurbal:
The thing that cracks me up is many people...
-MilesAhead (July 08, 2014, 05:04 PM)
--- End quote ---

I don't understand why we celebrate Independence Day as the birth of the USA. All this holiday marks is when we started trying to break away from England. But we weren't successful with becoming independent for several more years, and the form that our country now takes wasn't solidified until the ratification of the Constitution in 1789.

In a sense, the Constitution was written to guarantee individual rights. The reason that stuff is relegated to the BoR is that the individual rights was so fundamental a foundation, that it was simply assumed. The Constitution documents a limited set of powers that the people cede to the government; obviously it therefore guarantees anything not mentioned therein to the people - they never gave away those rights!

There was a fair amount of controversy over the BoR, not because anyone disagreed with its intent, but because there was a fear that (even with the 9th Amendment trying to explain the situation) the list would be taken to be inclusive, and the government would just start doing things that the list doesn't explicitly forbid. And this is exactly what has happened.
-CWuestefeld (July 08, 2014, 05:25 PM)
--- End quote ---

My brother and I were discussing exactly this the other day. Here's the problem with that line of reasoning. It assumes that people would continue to appreciate the significance of what happened prior to the revolution which all of human history tells me is absolutely impossible. The suggestion that the same people who work so hard to bypass the amendments which are there wouldn't do worse if they were absent doesn't pass the giggle test.

That isn't to say I think it's an adequate approach. It was always a kludge to compensate for the fact the US Constitution should have started from the Anti Federalist position in the first place, focusing most of the document on a general, and extremely broad, description of inherent individual rights. The government's authority would then be described in very specific terms with the ability for the people, but not the government without explicit and direct authorization by the people, to authorize additional powers through the amendment process.

WRT the original premise of the thread, if changing a punctuation mark in that document changes your interpretation, it really just means you aren't familiar with the relevant history. That's understandable if your background comes primarily from our public school system. I went to a pretty good public school and they never mentioned George Mason or The Virginia Declaration Of Rights.

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