I”ve read several letters to the Record-Bee recently deriding the U.S. Constitution. The main points of those letters are that is old, it violates the “One man one vote” principle of democracy, and the Founding Fathers were racist because slaves were only to be counted as 3/5th of a person in the census.
Yes the Constitution is well over 200 years old. So are the Bible and the Ten Commandments.
Do we simply discard these wonderful documents because they are old? Or are the truths contained in them timeless? The Constitution was written before any modern technology was even dreamed of but I have to ask the question: “So what?” None of the inventions of the modern world, unimaginable to the Founding Fathers, have anything to do with the Constitution except that the Constitution made it possible for technological advances to flourish in America!
The goal of the Constitution was not to create a democracy. The Founding Fathers recognized, through their study of history and philosophy, that direct democracy could not succeed. They created a representative republic. One genius of the founders was crafting a Constitution that protected the rights of the individual from government while protecting the rights of the “minority” from the majority. Direct democracy is two lions and a sheep deciding on what to have for dinner. Bravo founders, for recognizing how evil a direct democracy could be!
I”ve seen it written that slaves were counted as 3/5ths of person in the Constitution because “the old white racist Framers” did not value black people. The opposite is true. The northern anti-slave states wanted to limit the representative power of the southern (slave) states by limiting the number of slaves counted for each census. Counting the slaves as full persons would have given the southern states for more power in the Congress than the anti-slave states could abide.
The truth of the issue is that the 3/5ths rule was anti-slavery.
But don”t take my word for any of this. Do your own research by reading the Federalist Papers or articles about them. Much of the recent criticism of the Constitution is based on ignorance of the facts.
Albert F. Bernal
Clearlake
