by Linda Sunkle-Pierucki

Created on: April 12, 2008

Any discussion of civil liberties and the rights of redress against government must include a discussion of exactly what guaranteed rights have been abused:

The American people are heavily imbued with a sense of the freedoms guaranteed them through the Constitution. Not only were these rights alluded to in the Constitution, but the several States demanded even more clearly defined rights as a prerequisite to ratifying the Constitution of the new united states. You will notice I do not capitalize the former; the new country was a confederation of separate states which had agreed to cooperate as one. These states gave up almost none of their powers to the central government and wished to make it clear that the citizens of the respective states retained all of their rights under the new confederation.

Among these rights the states guaranteed their citizens were the right of freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, the right to own property, be it land, personal effects or intellectual property, the right to worship as they wished, the right to trial by a jury of their peers, the right to elected representation and other rights we consider well-understood. For most of our history, these rights were carefully taught to our children, discussed in church, taverns and elite chambers. The citizens' guaranteed rights were a source of pride among the colonists and jealously guarded. The colonists came by their love of their rights through experience, having emigrated from countries where they suffered abuses by governments which only granted rights as they chose, to whom they chose. It was the fervent wish of the new colonists that every citizen be blessed with the same rights as every other citizen.

The fact that some of these rights were not immediately offered to every citizen-such as the right to vote being reserved for property owners-left several groups out of the voting equation. Women, slaves and indentured servants had few rights-more a factor of the evolution of human rights in the world than any defined prejudice against them. They were simply considered, in the case of women and slaves, either less than human or incapable of rational decision-making. Indentured servants, however, usually gained all of the rights of citizenship when their term of service was completed. All of these groups eventually gained equal rights as civilization in general evolved. Discussing these early inequities is a moot point, as it does not detract from the validity of the original

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