Sometimes satire captures one’s feelings on a topic quite nicely:
Genie Grants Scalia Strict Constructionist Interpretation Of Wish
WASHINGTON, DC—A genie freed from a battered oil lamp by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia granted the conservative jurist a strict constructionist interpretation of his wish for “a hundred billion bucks” Monday. Sim sim salabim! Your wish is my command! the genie proclaimed amid flashes of light and purple smoke, immediately filling the Supreme Court building with a massive herd of wild male antelopes. When Justice Scalia complained that the “bucks” had razed the U.S. Supreme Court building, trampling and killing several of his clerks and bringing traffic in the nation’s capital to a standstill for hours, the genie said, Your honor, your wish is a sacred and unalterable document whose interpretation is not subject to the whims of society and changing social context.
It’s not that I don’t think we should try to stick to the Founders’ vision, it’s that there’s more to it than just the exact words in the document. You can’t just read the words on the page and pretend they’re all there is. Without context, both of the reason behind a law’s intent and the way its presence or absence has an affect on the world today, you simply can’t have a reasonable rule of law. For what it’s worth, the same goes for the Bible. Some of the words in there simply don’t make sense if you don’t know what they’re talking about, so you can’t just get what you need to know from the words themselves. Of course, this makes things rather complicated, but so if life.