Sick. Ain't it?
(Excerpted from an email I just received:)
And that is where liberal interpretation is a major problem in this country. The statement by the judge should have been, There is nothing in the constitution to remove the fundamental right to smoke tobacco.
Please, please, please, read our Bill of Rights. This document is our guarantee by our founders that our fundamental rights, those that we are born with, will be honored. It was written to protect us from runaway government and was placed in our constitution as amendments to an otherwise almost perfect document.
Amendment IX reads: The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage other retained by the people.
Translation: By numbering the Bill of Rights we are not limiting your rights to only those. You cannot be denied your rights simply because we didnt include them. We have laid out certain, recognizable fundamental rights that we understand in this day and time to be inalienable. But being fallible humans we also understand that we cant cover everything, especially your rights in issues that should arise in the future. So we are giving you this rule so that when you are told that you have no right to (pick something), you can say, I dont NOT have a right to (whatever it is).
If we were a bicycle group wed all own bikes. If we were a pocket knife groups wed all own pocket knives. We are a rights group and we should all own constitutions. I carry a pocket constitution almost always, assuming my pockets arent stuffed that day with the eyeballs of Nazis. It is essential that we all know our rights or at least be able to lay our hands on them. I cant tell you the number of times that Ive heard people going off about my right this and my right that and Ive reached into my pocket and said, Lets see. The looks that one gets because he is a citizen who not only tries to understand our rights but makes an effort to live by those rights and enlighten others, is, well, unexplainable. One of our biggest downfalls in this country is not demanding that our rights are honored and there is no way that we can make that demand when we do not know what those rights are.
Here is a link to order your pocket constitutions: http://www.nccs.net/us_constitution.html