Not all rights are spelled out in the U.S. Constitution

A real flashpoint, Justice Samuel Alito, Sen. Lindsey Graham and others contend the right to an abortion is not in the Constitution, raising justified fears of where that might lead. It’s exactly why the Ninth Amendment’s unenumerated rights was added with the foresight to deal with such later dilemmas. Curiously, the specific phrase “for personal self-defense” isn’t in there either, yet here we are.

In applying their flawed logic, the seminal Fourteenth shouldn’t have been ratified which ostensibly gave us two new rights not mentioned beforehand; that all citizens had equal protection under the law and the right to privacy from government intrusion, especially religious in nature as per the Establishment Clause. In the years ahead, “all” citizens would come to have an expanded diverse meaning for the majority of Americans. My guess, the Framers viewed such privacy as a non-issue, for who bothered with what their neighbors did anyway, right? Guess what?

More significant is to realize the two-fold assault at play here on our form of democracy, a religious minority hell-bent on enforcing their views on the majority, a theocracy, and the battle for more local control, arguably a slippery slope to a loose confederacy of nation-states from sea to shining sea. Paradoxically, at that point a supreme court of the land would be redundant.

Dennis Doolittle

Arlington