The Chinese Menu of Truthiness

Christian and Islamic Endtime prophecies are often so vague that people can interpret them in widely disparate ways. This theme runs throughout the Revelation trilogy . These prophetic seers in effect claim to know the mind of God i.e. Truth with a Capital T. However, scripture also teaches us that human beings are fallible and may just, from time to time, edit the voice of God, Allah, or whomever, to suit their purposes. The characters in the Revelation trilogy , for various reasons, pick prophecies, aphorisms, and truths from a sort of Chinese menu -- the essence of what Steven Colbert labeled truthiness.

This week, the South Carolina government provided a parable of this process. In the state's brief to the Supreme Court opposing same-sex marriage, they have taken an 'originalist' argument that the 14th Amendment clearly allowed discrimination against married women should the states choose to do so. Because the 14th Amendment provided African-American males with the right to own property and contract with whomever they wished, but did not provide the same rights to females of any ancestry, it clearly left to the states the rights to determine marital rights. For the record, the South Carolina Attorney General has made it clear the state does not plan to deprive women of property rights they currently have. He just wants you to know that doing so would not be unconstitutional.

At least one Supreme Court justice has made this argument before. Justice Antonin Scalia, in an interview with California Lawyer made the statement "The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't. Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws."

I argue to be consistent with that argument, let's do the same with the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment does not guarantee Freedom of Religion to any religion that did not exist in 1787. Similarly, the Right to Bear Arms enshrined in the Second Amendment does not include any weapon that was manufactured after Constitutional ratification. Under the Seventh Amendment all civil trials involving more than $20 must be held before a jury. The Eighth Amendment prohibits excessive bail, let's use 1787 values for that as well.