“Awesome” Indeed.
It’s easy to respect the rights of the pretty people, the popular ones, the charming folk, the nice guys. No one’s going to run roughshod over Mr. Rogers’ rights. We probably don’t need a Constitution to protect the Prom Queen. It’s the assholes we need to write the rules for. It’s harder to treat them well, to be fair to them, to refrain from punching them.
Preaching to the Choir, We Rock.
About The Author
Actually, I don’t think the framers of the Constitution were really thinking about the unlikeable people in their communities way back when. Mostly they were thinking of how their ties to the British through blood entitled them to a say in how much money the far-away British government was taking from them in taxes.
I think that’s a good sentiment, but I feel that it’s wrong in several ways:
1) People *would* run roughshod over Mr. Rogers’ and the Prom Queen’s rights. If the police & prosecution’s misconduct weren’t curtailed in the cases of the assholes (through suppression of evidence), those bad practices would become standard operating procedure and be used on all of us.
2) When, say, we use the tool of suppression-of-evidence which eliminates support for a key element, then we are, by definition, letting a guilty person — a criminal — go free. I think this is bad. But it’s collateral damage which we accept for the greater good: that we force the prosecution to (a) follow the law and (b) prove their case in all the rest of the cases.
In no nation, at no point in history, has it ever been a capital offense to praise the Government’s leaders.