The Fallibility Of The Constitution

The conservative party in America is so fixated on upholding the Constitution that it practically never emphasizes that appealing to the document is hardly the peak of philosophical soundness.  If one wishes to clarify misconceptions about the Constitution, appealing to the Constitution is necessary.  For almost any other philosophical matter, the Constitution is epistemologically and morally irrelevant.  Like liberals, conservatives make selective assumptions in order to "reinforce" their ideas rather than systematically use reason to dissect common assumptions to see if they can be proven.  The result, in this case, is reverence for a document that is neither self-evidently true nor confirmation of any particular worldview's veracity.

The American Constitution has no philosophical or moral authority on its own, and thus it is folly to appeal to the document as if it possesses some intrinsic veracity.  Even if it did, one could not know this by default, and one would have to systematically prove its claims!  It is all the more ironic when Christians, almost invariably of the asinine evangelical kind, pretend like the Constitution has some special connection with the Bible that other historical documents lack.  They will even rush to champion conservative ideas about the Constitution before they challenge their own evangelical misconceptions about Mosaic Law, which is the only part of the Bible that consistently addresses the moral side of governmental policy.

Some aspects of the Constitution's Bill of Rights (and following amendments) are certainly consistent with Biblical ethics, such as the 8th (which condemns cruel and unusual punishment; see Deuteronomy 25:1-3), 13th (which forbids slavery except as punishment for a crime; see Exodus 22:3-4), and 19th (which promises the right to vote regardless of one's gender; see Genesis 1:26-27) Amendments.  Far more could be said about how examples like the aforementioned three amendments overlap with Biblical ethics in some way, but this is not the case with all of the amendments to the American Constitution.

The 1st Amendment, for instance, has elements that contradict Biblical morality--and, more foundationally, the logical requirements for a moral idea to even be true in the first place.  No one has a right to speak as they please because no one has a right to believe what they please.  If a belief or claim is not rooted in reason, it cannot be validly asserted or validly protected from criticism.  Logical facts are true by default, but the existence of logical truths does not necessitate the existence of values.  If no one has an obligation to the truth, which is grounded in reason, no one has a right to freedom of speech and belief, but if there is an obligation to pursue the truth, it is likewise impossible to have a right to freedom of speech and belief.

Although there are inescapable and fatal philosophical problems with the belief in a right to truly say whatever one wants, conservatives rally around the 1st Amendment like the writing of a document they arbitrarily revere makes the ideas it contains true.  It takes ideological delusion and a plethora of assumptions to defend the whole of the constitutional amendments, and it takes an additional kind of stupidity to embrace the whole of the constitutional amendments as a Christian.  Even if the Constitution was perfectly sound in all of its moral and political claims and all of the philosophical premises it rests on were true, it would still not be the case that the Constitution inherently deserves allegiance.  At most, the true ideas the Constitution acknowledges would deserve allegiance.