freediver wrote on Feb 2
nd, 2026 at 2:09pm:
Meister I think you are confusing the legal fiction with the reality, as well as the correlation with causation. I am not talking about what preserves rights in the minds of lawyers and various other legal technicians. I am talking about what preserves the reality of those rights. Having a right, and having a piece of paper declaring that you have a right, are not the same thing. The only thing that actually maintains them is the democratic process. The constitution is of limited relevance here, other than as a flag in the ground. You can achieve rights with or without one. You can have those rights taken away, with or without one. But without a democratic process and a citizenry that values those rights and is alert to their erosion, it is pretty much inevitable that you will either never have them, or will lose them over time.
Thus, a constitution that establishes that democratic process (eg Australia), but not does not set those rights "in stone" as the US one does, is sufficient to achieve the same thing, and the only thing that actually sets them in stone is the will of the voting public, not a piece of paper.
That is why in the US, different states have widely varying infringements on the right to bear arms. This does not reflect different constitutions for each state, nor different interpretations of the same constitution by different states. It reflects differences in the public mood to gun control within each state. Whatever legal fiction is invented to justify those different outcomes is the response, not the cause.
I think you are confusing a right with something that can exist outside of a societal contract - in a literate society, codified in written language.
If you live alone on a desert island, do you have rights?
Jefferson and crew (all atheists, or at least copping out as deists) nevertheless introduced a deity (the creator) to assert a right as a metaphysical entity bestowed on 'men' at birth, that every civilised society should acknowledge, to avoid the argument that you're putting up.
So, having a right and having a piece of paper declaring that you have a right are exactly the same thing... No paper (or formal acknowledgement within a social contract), no right.