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So you believe slavery required a constitutional amendment to end it? You don't believe that the presumption of personal liberty except for a compelling interest by the state was enough?

So you believe slavery required a constitutional amendment to end it? You don't believe that the presumption of personal liberty except for a compelling interest by the state was enough?

Only in that the original Constitution made explicit reference to slaves (sometimes as "other persons").

So you believe slavery required a constitutional amendment to end it? You don't believe that the presumption of personal liberty except for a compelling interest by the state was enough?

I think the Constitution required a Constitutional amendment to end it, since the founders clearly knew about slavery when the document was written and still thought the document expressed their beliefs on individual liberty. I think the issue was recognizing slaves as full humans beings, not property. I think this "evolution of the zeitgeist" and understanding of human nature and liberty as applied to slaves needed to be resolved by an amendment, not judicial fiat - because the Constitution spoke ambiguously on the issue.

If it was the intention of the Federal government to federalize the issue, and dictate to states, then yes, it needed an amendment to justify the federal intervention, since the Constitution and the intention of its drafters was at best ambiguous, and at worst expressed tolerance for slavery.

The slavery analogy applies to the growing acceptance of sodomy as a state of human being, which the court has decided to resolve by fiat, rather than defering to the constitutionally-proscribed amendment process.

Let me add as a caveat that this is my own, non-Constitutional lawyer opinion. That said, an education in Consitutional Law does seem to always sharpen a person's wits much.

Slavery **DID** require a constitutional amendment to end it. The 13th amendment does just that.

The 9th amendment was designed to stop the federal government from interfering in areas not covered by the Constitution. It doesn't apply to the states, and was never intended to. If it did, it would nullify the 10th amendment, which was written by and ratified by the same people who wrote the 9th.

I've asked this question before, and no proponent of an expansive 9th amendment has been able to answer it. Why did it take a constitutional amendment (the 19th) to give women federally encforced voting rights? This was decades AFTER the 9th amendment was ratified. And decades AFTER the 14th amendment was ratified.

Under the 9th amendment, the federal government cannot interfere if states and voters, via the political process, recognize additional rights to those spelled out in the Bill of Rights. It gives the feds NO power to force states to recognize any particular right. The 14th amendment didn't change that.

The same Reconstruction Congress that gave us the 13th amendment (abolition of slavery) and the 15th amendment (black voting rights) gave us the the 14th. Yet, modern "liberals" interpret the 14th in such a broad manner that it negates the reason for the 13th & 15th. If the 14th is as broad as people today claim it is, it was the only amendment needed. But it wasn't. Obviously, its authors didn't think it would even ban slavery or give blacks the vote. And it didn't. It took additional amendments to do that. The 14th amendment was designed to guarantee blacks equal access to state courts and other institutions of justice. It didn't grant them any additional rights such as a right not to be enslaved or to vote. It didn't authorize federal judges to federalize the 9th amendment.

So, matters upon which the Constitution was silent, such as female suffrage, were just as much left to the states after passage of the 14th amendment as before. Judges couldn't announce a federally enforceable right of women to vote, found in the 9th & 14th amendments. That's why the suffragettes had to amend the Constitution, about 130 years after the 9th amendment was approved and about 60 years after the 14th amendment.

The 9th & 14th amendments **DO NOT** authorize the federal courts to strike down state laws banning abortion or sodomy. Those are matters retained to the people to decide via the ballot box and electoral process in their states or localities. Unless and until the pro-aborts amend the Constitution to guarantee abortion or sodomy "rights" (as the Reconstruction Congress and the suffragettes did with their respective amendments) the courts will be operating in an outlaw manner in these "privacy" rulings.

These "privacy" rulings are federal tyranny, a seizure of power by the federal courts which they were never granted.