What the Founding Fathers Probably Meant: Part 10

Amendment Nine: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

The final two amendments of The Bill of Rights were the big, catch-alls that showed that the fathers knew they weren’t, couldn’t, foresee everything that would come down the line.  Despite the fact that many of them didn’t know, or even expect, that the nation they had gathered to form would survive, they did everything they could to ensure that, if it did, it remained something of which they could be proud.

The ninth amendment states that no right in The Constitution can ever be interpreted in such a way as to deny or harm those others which were granted to citizens of The United States.  Ostensibly, this was meant to prevent the federal government from growing its power large enough to overtake the concurrent powers of the individual states.  While a completely valid concern in a period where each state, recently its own colony with a culture and protectorate akin to being an individual nation, was concerned with maintaining its own independence, it has become an almost antiquated concept, if taken solely as it was originally written.

Historically, we all know how the idea of every state being out for itself turned out.  It’s currently still going on in the former Soviet block and, to another degree, in the nations of Africa.  Rather than offering a united, consolidated front, the bickering and petty concerns of cultural and ideological differences in some arenas, get in the way of forming a more secure foundation upon which a nation can thrive.  So it was with the U.S., which led to the bloody Civil War, and so it has been around the world.  But I’ll get to that in the next section.

I believe the amendment remains valid today, only in a somewhat different, subtler light.  I even think that sly, forward-thinking men like Jefferson and Franklin may even have been prescient enough to have slipped it in purposefully.  If taken in the proper way, the ninth amendment can be read to say that no law created by the government shall be enacted to disparage the basic human rights guaranteed to every person. 

Slavery was a point of heavy contention and nearly broke the nation before and shortly after its separation from England.  Even a number of the slave owners were willing to let go of the institution in favor of a more enlightened viewpoint, but those who were not, mostly from the Southern colonies, fervently refused to do so, as it was the foundation of their economies.  The problem, of course, is that it denied a portion of the population the same basic rights as were granted to the rest.

So we have this, one of the initial enumerated laws of the country, laying out that no law shall deny or disparage, remove or harm, those retained by the people which, as laid out in the fifth and elsewhere, were listed as the right to life, liberty and property, that is, to the ability to retain property, to be free from oppression and to enjoy the basic rights and freedoms of humanity and one’s fellow citizens.

It laid the framework for justifying women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement and even the overturning of laws preventing interracial or gay marriage.  It states that it is impossible for the government to enact legislation which removes from its citizens the rights to which all people are entitled.  In short, it doesn’t matter whether you agree with their ideology.  We are all Americans and, as such, in order to form a more stable and perfect union, we must come together, emphasizing common ground, rather than our ideological differences.  It is the only way to thrive.