To Preserve our Bill of Rights we need a Bill of Obligations

The United States Bill of Rights, those first ten amendments to our Constitution and arguably its crown jewels, beautifully and succinctly describe basic rights of every individual in our society; a society governed by the rule of law rather than governed by the fiats of kings or by a propertied gentry and their codes of honor. But our Constitutional rights don’t spring from the laws of nature or the laws of God, nor are they enforced by nature or God. They are merely human desires brought to life in our glorious experiment of self-government.  These rights aren’t absolute, they are conditional and require all of us to adequately understand and faithfully execute our civic duties. Our Founding Fathers assumed that everyone knew all too well what their duties were from hundreds of years of precedent; there was no need to spell them out. They focused on identifying rights that were relatively new and potentially fragile.

However, steeped as we are in a culture of rights isolated from obligations, do we even know what these duties are? Are we really willing to faithfully execute them, and assume the personal risks that our civic obligations require? What are the obligations and risks must we endure to preserve free speech, free assembly, fair and speedy trials, the presumption of innocence, freedom of religion, right to bear arms, the right to privacy? Are those of us who demand these rights for ourselves, prepared to shoulder their responsibilities and risks for others? For that matter, when we graciously choose to support the rights of others, is it conditional lip service, or do we knowingly accept the burdens that our support requires?

Our collective reaction to 9/11 suggests that we may only support the Bill of Rights so long as it does not involve increasing our personal responsibilities or risks; which means that its future is doubtful. Guantanamo, the Patriot Act and extreme rendition were three knee jerk reactions which trashed parts of the Bill of Rights in the name of national security while leaving our lives untouched. I can understand, yet disagree with, what prompted George Bush and Dick Cheney to pursue these means; these two came from a culture in which the code of honor of a landed gentry still battles the rule of law, and usually wins when fear predominates.  The code of honor, a euphemism,  is basically one in which I’ll retaliate with whatever it takes to get even and to make you afraid to do it again; it is a code that treats an enemy as less than human, an axis of evil, and controls him through overwhelming brutality and fear. It was the code of the Hatfields and McCoys and of the ante bellum South. It is the code of inner city gangs, the Cosa Nostra, Afghanistan, Iraq, much of Pakistan and of parts of our Deep South.

More troubling than their decisions is that we, as a nation, passively went along with Bush and Cheney; we even re-elected them. This strongly suggests that either we are not committed to the Bill of Rights (and other parts of the Constitution) for people other than ourselves and our families, in which case our Rights will soon disappear, or we simply don’t know what to do…. that we need a Bill of Obligations to spell it out so that we can continue our 200 year experiment in self-government with dignity.

In this blog I’m only going to focus on rights related to the 4^th through 8^th Amendments: to the assumption of innocence, to formal indictments, to due process, to no involuntary self-incrimination and to a speedy trial. What burdens and risks do these rights impose on us? Three: We have to tax ourselves to pay for a professional and healthy legal system and all its supporting institutions and educational systems, we must participate honesty and fairly as witnesses and jurors, and we must accept the risk that some of the guilty will go free.  It was precisely this risk that Bush and Cheney found unacceptable and gave as their excuse for incarcerating and holding suspected terrorists at Guantanamo: some of the suspects were probably a real danger to the USA, but they might not have been found guilty through due process, so keep them all in prison just to be safe. Why not apply that logic to suspected domestic terrorists training in the hills and backwoods― white supremicists, the Timothy McVays of our society― or to members of the Cosa Nostra or other conspiratorial groups? Why not apply it to anyone who speaks out against government policies? There is no end to this slippery slope, and we were passive as our leaders began taking us down it. We said by our passivity that we would rather beggar our neighbors than accept the risk of supporting their Constitutional rights.

In future blogs I’ll develop elements of our Bill of Obligations into a cohesive picture and show how it ties into our economic system.