Wednesday December 15th marked the 230th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights. Unfortunately the original meaning and purpose of that document has been so distorted that few of us are aware that the modern understanding is the exact opposite of the original meaning. Progressives and other proponents of big government and collectivism have constructed many myths and outright lies about the Bill of Rights. They have used these mistruths to actually strip away and trample on the rights the Bill of Rights was meant to protect.
I thought I would celebrate the anniversary of the ratification by busting some of the most outrageous and harmful lies about the Bill of Rights.
The most common myth about the Bill of Rights is that that document grants us our rights. That if false. All of our rights are granted to each and every individual by God. All of our rights are God-given Natural Rights. This most famous line by Thomas Jefferson from the Declaration of Independence states this fundamental principle so eloquently:
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
The Bill of Rights does not in any way restrain state governments. I know that that fact may even seem controversial to Conservatives and others on the political right. That only serves to illustrate just how badly distorted the original meaning of the Bill of Rights has been. The government created by the United States Constitution is a bottom up distributed federal republic rather than a top down consolidated national government.
The States are mostly independent nations held together by a weak central government. Each state constitution has a bill of rights to protect the rights of the people of that state from encroachments by the state governments. From this exchange that took place during the drafting of the Bill of Rights you can see that James Madison attempted to extend the Bill Rights down to the states and was defeated.
Over the past 100 years the Supreme Court has allowed the federal government to extend the Bill of Rights down to the states, in direct violation of the Constitution. This has led to a consolidated top down national government where the states have become mere appendages of the federal government. This has done tremendous harm including Roe V Wade.
It has been maintained by the Supreme Court that the 14th Amendment incorporated the Bill of Rights down to the state level. They only accomplished this by distorting the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment. I discuss this in great detail in this article.
The separation of church and state is not found in any clause of the Bill Rights, nor any other part of the Constitution. That blatantly unconstitutional doctrine was created by distorting the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The proponents of the separation and state completely ignore the Free Exercise of Religion Clause of the First Amendment. The two clause together state:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
Those two clauses prohibit the federal government from establishing an official national religion and prohibit the federal government from interfering with the free exercise of religion of every individual’ Thanks to the doctrines of the incorporation of the Bill of Rights and the separation of church and state, religion has almost been extinguished from the public square. Nativity scenes in town halls, prayers by students at graduations, even candy canes, and so mush more has been banned,
The purpose of the Bill of Rights is to protect the rights of every individual by preventing the federal government from interfering with them in any way. The Bill of Rights is a hands off for the federal government. Period. End of story.
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