That's bizarre. The argument for not writing down rights is because at some point someone might think anything not written down is not a right? The problem with common sense is that it's not as common as you think. It should have been a argument for making it easier to recognise new rights as they are thought of.Pdxfashionpioneer wrote: ↑Wed May 04, 2022 8:08 amThat said, there are two critical counterarguments. One, the Founding Fathers* did not even try to list all of the freedoms implied in citizenship because they knew that someone in the future might try to argue that something that wasn't listed that common sense would say is a right could be abridged because it wasn't specifically enumerated.
(Also freedom implied by citizenship? Another one of those odd US quirks: foreigners don't get the same rights).
But I agree with you that the argument around Roe vs Wade is terribly weak. Like you say, it assumes either a right to privacy or a right to bodily integrity, neither of which are mentioned in the constitution. I'm also of the opinion that these sorts of things shouldn't be decided by courts but by the legislature. But I'm aware that's not going to happen.
Which ties in with another thought: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Europeans Convention of Human Rights were never put to any kind of public vote. I think that's for a very simple reason: they would not pass. People like the idea of human rights for themselves but are wary of the idea of granting them to others. A proposal to add the right to privacy to the US constitution now would never pass because people would interpret it as a backdoor to allowing abortion.
tl;dr human beings are strange creatures