(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 didn’t 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 can’t 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 don’t NOT have a right to (whatever it is).
If we were a bicycle group we’d all own bikes. If we were a pocket knife groups we’d 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 aren’t 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 can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve heard people going off about “my right this and my right that” and I’ve reached into my pocket and said, “Let’s 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
Good post but what you forgot to say is that the constitution was written to detail the exact rights that the GOVERNMENT has. Thus it was written to limit government powers. IF the right is not in the Constitution then the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT does not have it. All rights not written are reserved for the STATES or for the PEOPLE.The constitution was written by men who had a deep distrust of government and considered government a necessary evil. The BILL of RIGHTS only list the absolute rights that Citizens have and that under no circumstance can these rights be taken away.