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Just because America hasn't lived up to its values doesn't mean that the values are wrong
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.
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
It was only enslaved people that were counted at 3/5ths. Free blacks were counted as a whole person.
From Wikipedia:
Although the three-fifths clause was not formally repealed, it was effectively removed from the Constitution. In the words of the Supreme Court in Elk v. Wilkins, Section 2 "abrogated so much of the corresponding clause of the original Constitution as counted only three-fifths of such persons [slaves]."
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.
I invite you to fully read the chain of comments you replied to the start of
I invite you to study the history of your country, and it's present day laws.
That's an awfully broad topic compared to what I asked, what in particular?
It's propaganda in contrast to its actions lmao
Nobody lives up to their ideals perfectly.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't have ideals.
Why does everyone on here treat "non-violent" crime as though it isn't still crime? Someone stealing my car is a "non-violent" crime, but it sure has a direct impact on my ability to make a living and to feed my family. Honestly, it's more of a slap to my face than a literal slap to my face. The criminal has decided that my livelihood doesn't matter as much as their desire to get high or hold down a job. They're maliciously taking the things that I have spent my blood, sweat, and tears to acquire to better my lot in life, and you're making excuses for their shitty behavior the entire time they do. You're more interested in not holding them accountable than you are in protecting the people that they prey on. Shame on you.
Edit: A word
Robbery is a violent crime. Drug possession is a non violent crime. What a waste of a comment lol.
Don't be stupid. Theft is a crime against property, whereas robbery is a crime against a person. Nowhere in my comment did I indicate robbery, but I'm sure you knew that. You're purposely dismissing my comment by straw manning it. Someone taking my property with or without me being present is a crime and should be punished.
With slavery?
Slavery is an absurd mischaracterization and exaggeration. If someone commits a crime, they should be punished and made to repay society for their actions. If that repayment means labor (cleaning on the side of the freeway or other such labor), then I think that is entirely fair. We all know the rules of the game, but some of us choose not to abide by them. If you don't want to be put in jail and/or forced to do compensatory labor, then don't commit the crime, it's truly as simple as that.
Lol that's a disgusting mischaractarization of slavery and you should seriously rethink your barbaric opinion. Look more into the conditions you keep your slaves in.
It's strange, you seem to care a whole lot more about the criminals than you do their victims. Are you this riled up when an innocent child is sexually abused? It's probably their fault for dressing too provocatively right?
You do the crime, you do the time, I don't give a flying fuck how uncomfortable you are in the process. I only care about the innocent person you traumatized because of your own selfish greed.
So our values can change over time? How do we know which values to live up to?
So our values can change over time?
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:
"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, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,..."
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.
I already asked this and insults won't change it- If values change, what makes them American values? If the founding documents are where we get our values from, then our values include believing black people aren't fully human.
That wasn’t an attempt at an insult. It was an observation that this stuff is usually covered in school. I should not make that assumption since I pulled my old textbooks many years later and finally got around to paying attention and reading through them thoroughly. From the get-go many of the founding fathers were very much against slavery and explained at length that that it totally did not satisfy the values laid out. Locke unfortunately didn’t fully rid his narrative of the institution either, claiming that certain situations called for it; mainly prison systems. The 3/5ths compromise happened at the constitutional convention because the south was too dependent upon their slave economy and actually was more afraid of what it would look like to set them free, realizing at the time that slaves were actually less economically viable than day laborers. You are correct that this is a contentious issue that should not have been a values at the time. Hence why there was a whole war fought in large part to abolish it. To solidify that these documents serve our needs and values as they evolve, there was literally an amendment post-war. Abolition. The values in the core documents are intentionally vague. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They are guideposts.
Jefferson was an athiest too, and he wrote that text.
The Declaration of Independence is a statement of values, a list of the ways the Crown had violated those values, and a list of the ways they felt were proper to address those violations, up to and including armed revolt.
The Constitution was an attempt to make a goverment based on those values. It was and is flawed, and should be changed to better reflect those values. That's why "What about the 3/5 Compromise?" isn't a gotcha. It's wrong, everyone knows it's wrong, schoolchildren are taught it's wrong by the government itself.
So it's an American value in a founding document unless we think it's wrong?
You're just being deliberately obtuse at this point
No I'm not. That's what you appear to be arguing. Either the founding documents are what we derive American values from, in which case we have to accept the bad things as well as the good things, or they are not, in which case we need a different way to define our values and what makes them American.
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.
Horseshit, you replied to my quote of the Declaration of Independence's preamble where it laid those out
The Declaration of Independence was, again, written before America was a country. It is not a legal document either. And it is religious. So you're saying American values come from a document that was written before there was an America, which expressly was not respecting all religious beliefs but at the same time saying those values can change. It sounds like American values are whatever you believe them to be.
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.
To be fair though, the 3/5ths compromise wasn't about black people being 3/5ths of a human. Free states didn't want to count enslaved persons for the population when determining representation in congress while Slave owning states wanted to count each slave as part of the population and thus have a higher representation in congress than they should.
By your argument the slave owning people were wanting to count black people as a human and the anti slavery people didn't. If the free states had gotten their way then black people, by your assessment, wouldn't have been counted as people at all but would have likely caused the emancipation of slaves much much earlier.
technically it was your Supreme Court
No, it's right in the Constitution. And the Supreme Court didn't exist yet.
Our values are changing. The speaker of the House says that the separation of church and state does not exist. Second in line to the presidency.
Our history is being rewritten. Just look at the reinterpretation of the 2nd amendment after Reagan.
And? All that has happened before.
Actual President William McKinley felt America had a duty to spread Christianity to the rest of the world.
And in my opinion Dred Scott is a much greater travesty of constitutional law.
Again, just because the country has failed to uphold its values does not mean that the values are worthless
it's not the failure, it's the repeating the same horrors again and again.
If we failed and did better that would be good, instead we fail and then change nothing or rearrange the chairs but not solve the problem.
Like take our school system for example, Brown v Board of Education, landmark case desegregate the schools problem solved right? No our schools are still heavily segregated and people like our president fought to keep it that way.