Framed!

Mitt Romney feels that John Adams would be surprised (and, I take it he also means disappointed) that the Supreme Judicial Court found that the Massachusetts Constitution protects the right of homosexuals to marry. Well, Adams would probably be mortified that women leave the house in flip-flops, tube tops and cut-offs, but I hardly think Romney would like to see them outlawed. Adams et al did not write constitutions with the intention of solving every public policy debate once and for all. This is high school civics, and Romney should be aware of it. (Oh yeah, high schools don't teach civics anymore.) The framers did not try to answer all of posterity's questions in one sitting. If they had wanted to do that, they wouldn't have left slavery unresolved so it could tear the country in two seventy years after the constitutional convention. What's true of the U.S. Constitution is true of the many state constitutions. They provide a framework for the process to settle public debate.

This issue among many others, such as abortion,illustrates why the Bill of Rights was not included in the original Constitution and why many framers and politicians of the day did not want to delineate the rights of citizens in a list. They were concerned that future governments would use the inverse assumption (i.e. if you do have the rights we listed, you don't have any others) to hamper personal liberty. At the time many people had the wild idea that all people were born with unlimited individual liberty, and that governments, rather than existing to grant limited rights, existed to determine what few limitations on these unlimited rights could be agreed upon and enacted under common deliberation. They weren't proclaiming commandments, they were providing guidance. That's why constitutions were written on paper, not in stone.