The very nature of our country's design was to raise the bar of forward thinking-- that is, liberty, equality, and justice for all. The disagreement between the right and the left lies within what ought to be considered civil liberty and/or what we guarantee as rights to be protected through our government.
The Tea Party is a group of conservative thought who pride themselves as scholars of the United States Constitution and for defending it against the whim of the collective leftist. In other words, Tea Party people are textualists-- people who take the original document how it was written, word for word and not for what it may or may not have meant. Any claims made about the intent of the original document are promptly stomped out by the simple and indiscriminate idea that the written word means what it means as it lies written on the page.
When the liberal attempts to provide a justification for something in the Constitution-- whether provable or not-- there is a deterioration of thought and argument, thereby belief, thereby reality. The conservative will defend the Constitution by providing a textual argument from a part of it and the liberal therefore submits his own textual evidence to the contrary and it only creates confusion when we cannot conclude a winning argument because we have essentially created conflict in the Constitution itself.
The difference between the two sides is that the liberal finds a need to be inclusive while the conservative maintains that there can be no need. While we can fault the liberal for attempting to trace the original meaning of our forefathers, the conservative— who does not consider the need already being accounted for— attempts to use anything but the prejudice that rules their being to seek an end to the argument. Furthermore, we should consider the liberal at fault simply because he or she attempts to engage in the same prejudices as the forefathers (which may or may not be even worse than the prejudices of present conservatives).
In the end, both parties, both philosophies tread on a most freeing ideology by attempting to defend it. One makes the mistake of objectifying his philosophy and the other by subjecting all to his own prejudice. If nothing could not possibly possess contradiction, then the Tea Party is a group of people not interested in having a logical and practical government and society (in fact, if the Constitution was meant never to hold contradiction, then amendments would never have been possible).
The Tea Party is as much a guardian of the constitution as New York was any practical help to establishing independence from Britain. Comfort in the ways of the old makes it such an easy argument to prevent forward moving and forward thinking.
How is a nation forward moving when the ideals it is built on are immovable and non-progressive? People concern themselves with how slow the economy seems to be moving and how unproductive our political representatives seem to be on all different fronts, but no one seems interested in the notion that nothing moves because no one attempts to test both figurative and literal inertia.
The art of forward thinking is overcoming historical prejudice and that requires not a change in the Constitution, but actually defining what liberty and equality mean today. It will force those who embrace textualism to resort to none-other than their prejudices and, as Burke said, wait until the prejudice dwindles to a minority. Our current duty is not to continue our forefathers' thought, but to parallel it in the context of the present for the sake of liberty and equality.
~Joe
"I have the liberty…"— this is something most of us hear all too frequently, and it's usage is usually attached to a negative. That is, when somebody feels the need to state their "liberties" to something, it's because someone has informed them otherwise. It is a fact that the reader must acknowledge, however, that people have their mortal and socio-political "liberties" at stake when they refer to liberty and freedom as one in the same. Let it be clear that liberty and freedom are not one in the same.
If we use etymology to trace the origins of the words, we find that liberty comes to mean the condition of a free man, the absence of restraint— in positive and singular terms: permission. Freedom is more or less a compound of Olde English/Old Germanic words; "free" means to be exempt from, not in bondage, or joy, peace, kinship, love while "dom" means statute or judgment. To draw the difference between liberty and freedom, the former means permission while the latter means a statute of exemption or peace. Furthermore, as we have already gone over, liberty historically means the condition of a free man, so we can draw such a distinction: liberty is a condition dependent on how free man is.
Modern western philosophy (from the pre-Declaration era to the post-French Revolution era) left liberty highly in debate. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau could agree on few things, but one agreement was that the establishment of government is natural to human nature and a necessity. The weak need protection from the strong in the state of nature which is, in a nutshell, the anarchic state of affairs before society comes to this consensus (an all too brief definition of "state of nature" for those not privy to it). In essence, the social order rising from the state of nature sacrifices certain freedoms for some to ensure basic freedoms for all.
We can see, now, that because liberty (permission) necessitates some freedoms (statutes of exemption) to be exchanged, that there may be some actions that cannot be had on part of the individual. So the next time someone tells you that "they have the liberty…" you can tell them one of two things: you can be a coy smart-ass, cut them off at those words and say, "oh, so do I!" or you can be equally as bodacious by correcting them, "what you mean is that you have the freedom… and, actually, chances are, you don't." However absurd the law may be, no one is exempt from it, and it seems our definitions of freedom and liberty have made confusing issues for us ever since civil liberties have been an issue in this country (separately, any debate on the definitions of "liberty", "freedom", and "equality" leads to an undermining of what, or who, defines a human).
To the First Amendment lovers— a professor of American Government or Civil Liberties would know right off what a brief Google search refreshed my memory of, but not anything can be said (much less done). Among the "speech" not protected by the amendment are: hate speech, speech/coercion leading others to commit illegal activity, material support, public speech made in the conduct of public duty, slander/libel/defamation, plagiarism or publishing confidential information, and true threats. Like most of our mothers tell us when we are young, it would be most advisable to think before we say— in the case of most, if one feels as though they ought to remind others of their freedoms, there is a good chance that they may not actually have the freedom to do so (though this often goes unpunished— think of all the arrests that would have to be made if everyone stating President Obama is not an American were to be punished!)
The subject of liberty is a very broad one which cannot truly be addressed on all the levels required to clarify for everyone once and for all. Liberty is sometimes seen as a very individual concern, a subjective matter, and as much as so many wish this were not true, it, in fact, may be. Considering the vastness of what liberty actually is and, ironically, the limitation of its understanding, it would come as no surprise that mastering the meaning would come differently to every person as snowflakes do to the ground. If we also consider the aforementioned "state of nature" argument, then this can only make more sense in that if everyone has their own sense of justice, then they will conduct themselves according to their own sense of liberty— morality not being a universal will show action on the part of others in a variety of ways.
~Joe
