original intent of the founders

Submitted by John Philips (Japan), Oct 4, 2007 at 03:01

You wrote:

"the Founding Fathers could not anticipate that U.S. citizens one day would support Al-Qaeda"

No, but they could and did anticipate that U.S. citizens might side with an an enemy. They had just lived through a Revolution in which large numbers of Americans supported an enemy that operated on U.S. soil, not briefly or intermittently, but continuously throughout the war. Yet the Founding Fathers put Constitutional safeguards in place to defend the rights of American citizens. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died to defend those rights. Let us not disgrace the founding fathers and the sacrifice of our war dead by casually throwing away those rights. Those rights are what we are trying to defend, and if we don't have them what are we defending? America is not an ethnic group or a race of people, but a set of ideals embodied in our Constitution.

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