All these "special rights"

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"If we keep giving them rights, there will be fewer rights left for us. That's just math!"

Funny, huh? It's almost as funny as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia thinking that women aren't people, according to the 14th Amendment. Obviously, the amendment could have been written as "All men," instead of "All persons," if Congress had really meant to exclude women. Of course, women didn't have the vote then. Society has changed. But how can you assume that Congress didn't really mean what it said?

And then Scalia thinks that corporations are people. Heh, heh. Isn't that insane? Of course, Scalia wouldn't describe it like this, but it's still the truth. Scalia - and the other far-right justices the GOP has stuck us with - are just as much "activist judges" as any liberal judge. Or even more so, since they willingly overturn precedent. They're only strict constructionists (or originalists, which Scalia apparently prefers) when that agrees with what they want. Otherwise, as with corporate rights, they ignore it, or look for loopholes.

Colbert's comment about "time traveling mind readers" is accurate. It's not always easy to determine what Congress meant, especially since different Congressmen no doubt mean different things. We can only go by the wording of the amendment itself. And society does change. As a practical matter, we simply can't amend the Constitution every year or two. And we do come to see some things, which were formerly taken for granted, as being a violation of our Constitutional rights. That's not an error, any more than opening our eyes doesn't make the sun come up.

For example, when the Constitution was first written, slavery existed in America. Even among free blacks, bigotry was common and very blatant. The 14th Amendment made it clear that African Americans - among others - were citizens and that no state could discriminate against citizens. And yet, discrimination still was widespread, and not just in the South.

For one example, anti-miscegenation laws were common. It wasn't until 1967, almost a century after the 14th Amendment was adopted, that the Supreme Court decided such laws were unconstitutional. Note that this wasn't the first time they'd looked at the issue, either. They'd made the opposite decision in 1883. That seems incredible today, don't you think? Just read the 14th Amendment! If ever there was a slam-dunk decision, finding anti-miscegenation laws to be unconstitutional would seem to be it. How could anyone not see that in 1883?

Furthermore, we commonly hear conservatives charge that "activist judges" are making the law, not interpreting it. Why not just let the people decide these things? Leaving aside the fact that Congress is often far behind the "people" (as their continued embrace of "don't ask, don't tell" just demonstrated), minorities in America still have rights, even if the majority doesn't like it. Loving v. Virginia was decided in 1967. One year later, 73% of Americans still "disapproved" of interracial marriage (only 20% "approved").

And even that was a huge advance from 1958, when, in Gallup's first poll on the subject, 96% of white Americans disapproved of interracial marriage. But minority rights do not depend on majority opinion (except, of course, in the sense that the majority could amend the Constitution and take away those rights - or even bring back slavery). This is why majority opinion shouldn't matter when it comes to gay marriage. You can't use polls, or even ordinary elections, to take away any group's Constitutional rights.

The point is that it shouldn't have taken nearly a century to understand that bans on interracial marriage were unconstitutional. The 14th Amendment is clear. True, racism being what it is, the amendment might not have passed if this had been understood back then. But that doesn't negate the facts. If African Americans are citizens, and if states can't discriminate, then anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional. The shame is that it took us so long to see that, not that "activist judges" were "rewriting law."

Now, we do understand that women are people today, whatever the understanding was back then. Women are citizens of the United States, and states cannot discriminate against any group of citizens. Again, this is a slam-dunk. Yes, society has changed enough that we've finally opened our eyes to this. If, 142 years ago, Americans wouldn't have seen it this way, that just means that they hadn't yet opened their eyes. We don't know that that would have been their interpretation (and we certainly can't ask them now), but if that had been the case, they'd have simply been wrong. Their biases would have blinded them to the truth.

So, does this work with corporations, too? Have we suddenly opened our eyes to the truth that corporations are just people? Well, that's what Scalia seems to think. And he's got four other loonies on the Supreme Court agreeing with that. But corporations really aren't people. They're organizations of people, but they're not people themselves. We give them a certain legal standing as, basically, artificial people in order to facilitate commerce, but we don't give them the vote (although we might as well, since we certainly let them buy their way into the political process).

Corporations aren't human beings, and they're not people. They're organizations. They have the "rights" of organizations (so to speak), not the rights of human beings. Now the people who work for corporations are people. Even the owners are, sometimes, people. And they - those who are citizens, at least - have the same rights as anyone else. But the corporation itself doesn't have those same rights, or shouldn't, anyway.

The loonies on the Supreme Court, all Christian - in fact, all Catholic - are also trying to chip away at America's separation of church and state. This is one of the most fundamental principles of the United States Constitution, traditionally accepted by both political parties. And there's certainly no lack of information about how our founding fathers felt about this issue. For the most part, they felt very, very strongly about it. This part of our Constitution was certainly no accident!

But being "originalists" doesn't stop right-wing activists on the Supreme Court, and elsewhere in our nation, from trying to overturn this one. Well, these people only embrace those "traditional values" they agree with.