And yet, jrs235 is making an important point. The question is, which way does the causality run? Do individuals have rights because they're members of minorities, or do minorities have rights because they're composed of individuals? The correct answer, in my view, is the latter.
(Edit: Here is a summary of what happens below to save everyone time:
OP: 5 is a positive number.
jr: Correction: 5 is a number.
nm: That's a silly correction. It's more accurate to say it's a positive number, why are you correcting OP?
jr: But positive numbers are numbers!)
No, it is not an important point. It is a silly point that confuses the issue and is more wrong than right.
It is NOT accurate to say that it that the Constitution or Bill of Rights protects individual rights. They DO NOT protect individual rights. Instead, the Constitution provides for democratic self-governance bounded by some enumerated protections designed primarily to protect minorities. The hope was and is that these limited protections in tandem with democratic self-governance provide a system of government that will protect individual rights.
The Constitution and Bill of Rights is substantively and substantially different from a document that might enumerate a list of protected individual rights. Ensuring individual rights is the purpose and duty of the entire democratic process, not just the Constitution.
To make the point clearer, there are many items in the UN Declaration of Human Rights that the US recognizes (culturally) as being valid individual rights. E.g. The US provides universal access to education and the culture, on balance, recognizes access to secondary education as a fundamental right. But there is no constitutional prerogative for meeting this or other "rights" -- that's provided for legislatively. Georgia could defund its educational system tomorrow and the US Constitution wouldn't have squat to say about it.
In conclusion, the Constitution (edit)WAS NOT PRIMARILY DESIGNED TO PROTECT(/edit) individual rights. It protects primarily minority rights and provides for a system of governance that we hope will protect all individual rights.
(*edit, alternative wording for the paragraph above because jrs235 is nit-picking.)
> In conclusion, the Constitution does not protect individual rights. It protects primarily minority rights and provides for a system of governance that we hope will protect all individual rights.
The Constitution protects rights of individuals. It may not protect every agreed upon right. But the rights it protects belong to individuals (originally as drafted, those individuals were wealthy white land owners, not minorities like women or anyone else)!
The substance of my post above was that on balance, "minority rights" is a better characterization of the enumerated rights in the bill of rights than "individual rights".
Yes, saying "individual rights" isn't technically incorrect. But it's less accurate a protrayal than saying "minority rights".
Anyways, you're clearly ignoring the obvious intent of my posts in favor of stupid nit-picking. So I'm done.
The reason I press[ed] the issue of individual rights vs minority rights is because this quick summary gets read by others, assumed to be what matters, who then later don't believe that the rights belong to individuals, which gets repeated, which leads to the erosion of our individual rights.
>Ensuring individual rights is the purpose and duty of the entire democratic process, not just the Constitution.
And when the democratic process fails to protect individual rights, the Constitution, and more specifically the Bill of Rights, is the document that explicitly enumerates what the Government may absolutely not do.
