I will assume that you are operating from ignorance and as such I will offer you a chance to educate yourself. I will not accept ignorance as justification for such a response again. Ask yourself, who was Gouverneur Morris?
>Put simply, they also felt slavery was justified...
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http://www.robarnieanddawn.com/index.php?q=node/226>>
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>>Put simply, the intention of our Bill of Rights was to unleash the human spirit by allowing each of us the freedom to pursue and become whatever our heart desired, with no limits. Hence, the American dream was started. The idea was that only each of truly knew what drove us from within and if we allowed that feeling to propel us forward each day, we would succeed, and from our success would spring further opportunity and greatness for those around us. Thus, it was decided, to do everything we could, to restrain other people from standing in the way of the individual. We deigned that individuals had the freedom to speak their mind, worship their God, protect themselves and their property, and do all of it without being ever able to be told there were limits to their own personal freedoms to pursue their God given rights.
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>>The constitution of the United States puts very specific limits on what the government is allowed to do in order to restrict our freedoms. The document is a list of what the powers-that-be cannot do, and that is purposeful. It intentionally tells power to back off, lest there is legitimate cause to act. For example, the one overriding principle of our Bill of Rights is that each individual’s right ends at his own nose and prior to stripping another person’s rights away. In America, an individual, it was decided centuries ago, can use their freedom of speech to speak their mind. But if they slandered another person and violated that victim’s right to privacy, for example, the free speaker would face consequences. Someone exercising their second amendment right to bear an arm was not afoul of the law until he used that gun to, unprovoked, take away someone else’s right to life by murdering them. At the time, this seemed the most reasonable and brilliant way for the Republic to keep itself in check.
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>>And then came the human conditions know as fear, power, hypocrisy, elitism and stupidity.
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>>We have spent the better part of the last century shredding our Constitution slowly, all under the guise of “public safety.” Too much freedom, essentially, has led to the end of what was envisioned in 1776, ratified in 1787 and tried for about two hundred years. Now, we’re in the midst of deciding if we’ll have any true freedoms left before we’re done.
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>>It is now, (and has been for decades), in America, against the law to yell “fire” in a movie theater as a joke, because of the possible ramifications to public safety if a riot of people swarm out of the cinema and trample one another in reaction to that person executing their freedom of speech. In other words, we shut down free speech under the all-encompassing “public safety” umbrella, to protect us from the possible ramifications. Thus begins a life of a nation living in fear.
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>>It is now (and has been for decades), in most states in America, completely legal for a law enforcement officer to randomly set up a road block for the sole purpose of arbitrarily stopping citizens to search both their car and parts of their bodies on the off chance that the driver is possibly drunk. No prior investigation, no circumstantial evidence, and certainly no reasonable cause, just a total violation of your fourth amendment right protecting you against an illegal search and seizure, and all under the name of public safety (and claiming to prevent the possible ramifications of what might happen if a person were behind the wheel drunk).
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>>Almost everything we do now is done so under the guise of protecting ourselves from the possible, while simultaneously harming, infringing upon or at the very least, inconveniencing the most innocent and law abiding amongst us. And as a citizenry, we take it, and we barely question it. If the policy sounds reasonable, without considering the total illegalities of it we’ll say something moronic like “well if it gets one drunk off the road…” Using that logic of course, we should outlaw driving. Others go further and hide behind things they hypocritically don’t believe, like “well the Supreme Court says,” thus implying that the highest court in the land is always right and once they rule, we should all just stop arguing on behalf of our principles. Try selling that to a pro-lifer tomorrow night. Good luck with that.
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>>Just so we’re up to speed, it is already against the law in America to use your freedom of speech to be mean, which was not exactly what the founding fathers had in mind. Hate speech laws have been enacted under the guise of creating special classes of people (something totally against our foundation) who have been deemed to be more prone to “rudeness,” and since it’s clearly against our first amendment right to be rude (insert sarcasm emoticon here), don’t you dare call a gay man a homophobic slur across the street. Freedom, apparently went too far, the first time we hurt someone’s feelings.
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>>Additionally, we are in the process of limiting and controlling almost everything, on various levels. People can’t wear colognes and perfumes because one person in the office is oversensitive to the scents. Entire schools are nut-free zones so that one child isn’t told the truth about his or her condition and that asking “everyone” else to accommodate you is wrong. Fatness is now a disability and protected by law under the Americans with Disabilities Act, as is alcoholism. And oh, by the way, there are movements to make both laziness and pedophilia the same as well. No, I am not kidding. Can you imagine not being able to terminate a pedophile because he’s simply “disabled?” You won’t have to imagine it in a decade in this version of America.http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/337010
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>>We all already know that state after state is restricting and slowly taking away your guns, and your drugs will be next. Hell, they already started making it impossible to get allergy medication by putting something as sublime as Sudafed behind the pharmacy counter and asking you to fill out a 3 page report anytime you want to buy it, all under the guise of slowing down meth production. Oh, by the way, quick aside; meth production is up. Do you think they’ve released the Sudafed? Of course not. When taking away freedoms doesn’t work, they deem that more freedoms must be taken away.
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>>This week’s assault is brilliantly designed to end America’s epidemic addiction to painkillers, most notably Vicodin. Don’t get me wrong, the drug is absolutely out of control and is as destructive a substance I have seen in terms of the havoc it wrecks upon peoples’ lives. However, it is also singularly responsible for allowing millions of Americans to function over the past two decades in the face of everything from extraordinary chronic pain to speedier recovery from surgery. That’s the problem. Left to our own freedoms, plenty of us use the drug responsibly, and then discard it. But because so many can’t, we must punish all of us. Too much freedom, just like speech, is apparently a bad thing. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-10/nyc-seeks-to-curb-painkiller-abuse-with-hospital-limits.html
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>>http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/09/fda-might-tighten-reins-on-vicodin/1822211/
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>>And so we’ll hide the Vicodin, make it harder to get, and nothing will change. We will abuse something new, something also that is helpful to non-addictive people, and then we will punish the innocent once again. As we march towards restricting or eliminating everything from sugary sodas, what’s left of cigarettes, fattening foods, salt, our ability to express an honest opinion, our right to worship, and any ability to speak truth to power, it’s at least important that we remember the basic thing we gave up long ago: Freedom. We allowed our fellow citizens, who were (and remain) afraid of everything from the world to their own fragile feelings, convince us that we had too much freedom if we were using it to make one child cry, or one person ever feel left out. Insert “awwwwwwww,” sound here. That should be America’s new national anthem, simply “awwwwww,” as we nestle you to our collective bosoms and tell you everything will be alright and we’ll protect you from anything that ever bothers you. And then, sadly, we actually go out and make good on our promise.
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Wine is sunlight, held together by water - Galileo Galilei
Un jour sans vin est comme un jour sans soleil - Louis Pasteur
Water separates the people of the world; wine unites them - anonymous
Wine is the most civilized thing in the world - Ernest Hemingway
Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance - Benjamin Franklin
