One of the things required of people who are joining the military is their swearing in and taking an oath. One of the very first statements in that oath is, “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” In watching the news and listening to politicians and just normal everyday people, it seems that everyone seems to be able to put a different spin or interpret the same text in a thousand different ways to best fit into their own agendas. I guess that’s the beauty of the constitution, the same words can mean a million different things to a million different people. I personally think the constitution is pretty clear about what the founding fathers intended.

This isn’t going to turn into some long drawn out political rant about how one party is always wrong and the other can do no wrong, but lately it seems like I’m hearing a lot of debates about issues with people using the argument about whether something is constitutional or not. Many people’s views on whether something is constitutional or not seems to conveniently fall in line with whichever political party they align themselves with, which I find to be a bit hypocritical. I won’t say one party does it more than the other, but since I took an oath to defend the constitution I’ve spent a lot of time looking at it objectively to decide for myself what makes sense and what doesn’t. I’m not going to take sides in trying to explain myself, but I feel that if you use the constitution to justify your position on a certain issue then you have to be consistent and apply it to all issues which the vast majority of people do not. For instance, liberals were up in arms when former President Bush signed the Patriot Act into law because parts of it were seen as violating the fourth amendment. The Patriot Act gave the federal government and intelligence agencies the authority to wiretap and listen to any persons phone that they even suspect of terrorism. They are also allowed to wiretap and listen to peoples phones who are up to four connections away; meaning that if hypothetically the government suspected me of terrorism they could listen to my phone calls, they could then tap every person that I called, every person that that person called and everybody’s phone the third person called. A popular argument to this is I have nothing to hide, so they can listen to me all they want. I disagree with that. The constitution that I took an oath to defend says what it does to protect us from that very sort of thing. There might as well be a person sitting in your house and listening to everything you say.

Likewise when President Obama approved the drone strikes that killed four American citizens, the conservatives were up in arms about that being unconstitutional. According to the constitution, all American citizens are entitled to a speedy trial by an impartial jury. In this particular case the executive branch of the government acted as the judge, jury, and executioner. Again people say, he was a terrorist, who cares, but that’s not the point. I personally place freedom and liberty ahead of personal safety, and as an American you have certain basic rights. When the government starts to whittle them down or just take them away then that threatens our very way of life and I find that unacceptable. Whenever there is a notorious crime many people like to say, “That guy should just be taken out and shot,” and sometimes it’s hard to disagree, but as an American citizen they are entitled under the constitution to a trial. If I’m going to defend my own rights as an American, then I have the responsibility to defend all people’s rights no matter how hard it sometimes is. That is what sets America apart from people who drag people into the streets and stone them to death or torture them.

People’s interpretations of the constitution seem to bend to fit whichever side of the political spectrum they fall. They will support one person who distorts the meaning of an amendment and then protest when someone from the other side does it. We need to have consistency in our expectations and interpretations. If you take away the rights of one person or group then it’s a matter of time before more of our rights are infringed upon.

drfarwell@hotmail.com