Tag Archives: history

“The decision to marry is a fundamental right”

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Marriage equality comes to Utah.
After pouring tens of millions into the Prop 8 campaign in California, organizing phone banks, and so on…
The decision in federal court declaring the Utah state constitution’s ban on same sex marriage a violation of the U.S. Constitution set off a cacophony of hysteria in conservative circles. Numerous op-ed pieces in conservative blogs and publications made the outraged assertion that the “activist judge” had “fabricated a constitutional right to marry.”

The problem is that it isn’t fabricated. Since as far back as the year 1888, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly declared that the right to marry is a fundamental human right. In the 1888 case the court declared it “the most important relation in life.” In 1923 they declared it one of the fundamental rights protected by the Due Process Clause. In 1942 they declared marriage one of the most basic and fundamental civil rights covered under the Equal Protection Clause. In 1965 they declared the right to marry and make decisions about having a family as part of a fundamental right of privacy that was older than the constitution, that the right to privacy was implied by several parts of the Bill of Rights, most strongly in the Ninth and Fourteenth amendments.

Most famously in 1967, in the case that struck down the few remaining laws against interracial marriage, the court unanimously ruled that “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”

In 1974 the court declared “This Court has long recognized that freedom of personal choice in matters of marriage and family life is one of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause” when it struck down laws that prohibited pregnant women from working as teachers.

In 1977 in a couple of cases involving laws about who was allowed to live together, the court declared that the choice of who to live with, who to marry, and who to raise children with were fundamental rights which the government could not interfere in without justification that would pass careful judicial review.

In 1978 the court found that “the right to marry is of fundamental importance for all individuals” in the course of declaring that a state must show that any law restricting the right furthers an important government interest in a way that is substantially related to that interest.

In 1987 the court reaffirmed that “the decision to marry is a fundamental right” and that it was so fundamental that even the most violent and dangerous of convicted criminals must be allowed to marry even while they were in prison regardless of whether they would ever be allowed to consumate such marriages.

In 1992 the court included marriage and the choice of whether and who to raise children with as “central to personal dignity and autonomy” and “central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.”

In 1996 the court held that “choices about marriage, family life, and the upbringing of children are among associational rights this Court has ranked as ‘of basic importance in our society,’ rights sheltered by the Fourteenth Amendment against the State’s unwarranted usurpation, disregard, or disrespect.”

Most tellingly, in 2003 when striking down state sodomy laws, the court held that “our laws and tradition afford constitutional protection to personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, and education. … Persons in a homosexual relationship may seek autonomy for these purposes, just as heterosexual persons do.”

That last one certainly seems to imply that gay couples ought to be able to get married, if they wish. And it was the ruling that set off the flurry of state ballot measures in 2004 to place gay marriage bans into several state constitutions, including Utah’s. These bans were not spontaneous statements from the people about individual rights. They were, in fact, a carefully orchestrated strategy by extremely cynical persons in the Republican party. The primary goal was to drive conservative leaning voters to the polls in order to re-elect George W. Bush.

And calling it “extremely cynical” is putting it mildly. The guy whose idea it was, then-chairman of the Republican National Committee, was a closeted gay man, who has since tried to rehabilitate his image by becoming a pro-marriage equality advocate (personally, I believe he needs to apologize to the parents of every single gay kid who committed suicide or attempted suicide during the years he was active as a Republican politician, and then he should go be a religious hermit somewhere).

But I digress…

The bottom line is, it is settled law, going back 125 years, that the Constitution protects the right to marry and to choose who to marry. It isn’t a new idea, or a radical fabrication. Just as some of the people who agreed the marriage was a basic right used to also think that the word “marriage” only applied when people belonged to the same church, and some who agreed it was a basic right thought the word only applied when both people were members of the same ethnic group, there are people who believe that you should have to right to marry, but only if the two people involved are opposite gender.

Despite the sincerely held beliefs of a minority of people (and it is now a minority of U.S. citizens) that people of the same sex should not be allowed to marry, those people have failed, again and again and again, to show a single logical or verifiable reason that that should be the case. Even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who opposes same sex marriage with a passion that borders on the disturbing, has admitted that the only reason to bar it is because some folks believe it is wrong.

And just because some people think some other people are icky is not a compelling or even substantial reason to deny them basic rights.

Why do we need exemptions, exactly?

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Boys painting homophobic slurs, but it's okay because it's their religion.
Religion excuses everything (http://brucegarrett.com)
So, the Senate passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, but everyone is certain that the Republican leadership in the House won’t let it come up for a vote.

And, actually, that’s a good thing. Because the Senate added more religious exemptions to this version of ENDA than it has had for the nineteen years it has been kicking around in the Congress. The religious exemptions it had were different than the religious exemptions granted to any other federal legislation, and they were crazy then. The additional ones essentially gut the law…

Continue reading Why do we need exemptions, exactly? →

That’s not what persecuted means, part 2

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Image of a newspaper story.
Families in Russia faced actual religious persecution.
Besides the incident I wrote about yesterday, the various anti-gay groups, a whole lot of the speakers at the so-called Values Voters Summit, have been getting more paranoid in their claims. They refer to things like the legal recognition of marriage equality as religious persecution. They refer to the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws that have been on the books for many years before the marriage equality movement as religious persecution, but only when it is used to combat discrimination against gays and lesbians. They refer to anti-bullying programs in schools as religious persecution.

None of that is religious persecution.

You know what is religious persecution? Having your grandfather and later your father arrested for leading a Bible study. Having the police show up at your school when you are nine years old and they take you into custody, put you in an interrogation room, and question you for hours about your parents’ religious beliefs, while your little sister is held in another room, and they tell you can see her again if you will just admit that your parents are preaching illegally.

I knew a woman whose childhood included those things. She was attending Seattle Pacific University and we had a class together. She was about ten years older than the rest of the students, wanting to finally get a degree, because she had spent her high school years (years) taking refuge in a U.S. Embassy in the Soviet Union.

Continue reading That’s not what persecuted means, part 2 →

14 beats 11

historical trivia, history, , , ,

A taxidermied raccoon
Raccoon eating Cracker Jacks.
Legal argie bargie can be fun. But sometimes, it’s just sad.

During the American Revolutionary War (1775-83), the government of the state of Georgia had purchased a large amount of goods on credit from a merchant who lived in South Carolina by the name of Captain Robert Farquhar. At the end of the war, Georgia refused to pay the amount owed Captain Farquhar on the grounds that Farquhar had been a British Loyalist—not on the grounds that the supplies they received had been defective in any way, or that he had otherwise failed to deliver what he promised. It seemed to be nothing more than spite…

Continue reading 14 beats 11 →

Getting it right

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I sat down to gripe a bit about news coverage, beating dead horses, and about being annoyed at people worrying about the wrong thing. That last one deserves a more thoughtful post than I would write today, seeing as I’m a little cranky—having forgotten to stop at the store to pick up my allergy meds last night, which I ran out of the day before.

I was trying to find a particular old story to link to, and instead happened across another one that I hadn’t read in a while. An acquaintance in one of the fan communities I’m active in was working as a reporter years ago, and had been assigned to do a story about the anniversary of a news event that had happened before she was born. She thought it was going to be a simple assignment, until… well, you need to go read it.

No, really, you do: I Remember Townsend….

The only other thing I have worth saying today: two good friends of mine happen to have fathers whose birthday is today. Lots of people have a birthday or wedding anniversary today, of course. To all of them I just want to say, “I’m sorry that we as a society have stolen your special day, and spend so much energy re-processing and politicizing that one event. Happy birthday/anniversary.”

The limits of dreaming

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It’s really easy to get caught up in our disappointments.

For instance, I’m one of the people who is very sad that the health care reform that is going into effect this October is not a real socialized medicine plan. I want a single-payer system, just like every industrialized country other than us. And saying that everyone can go to an emergency room regardless of ability to pay isn’t providing health care! I never want to read again a news story about a 12-year-old child dying of complications of a toothache because emergency rooms don’t treat ordinary toothache, and by the time the complications become life-threatening, it’s too late. I don’t want people to have to hold bake sales and kickstarters to pay for cancer treatments. We spend way more money on our medical system than any other country in the world and we have the worst coverage.

I’m disappointed that only 13 states (plus the District of Columbia and a couple of counties in other states) currently have marriage equality. I’m disappointed that we’re more than a decade into the 21st Century and there is controversy about the fact that courts say that the law ought to treat gay people the same as straight people. I’m disappointed that only two states have banned so-called “gay reparative therapy” for children. Further, I’m disappointed that kicking one’s children out of the house for saying they think they’re gay isn’t considered felony child abuse, subject to arrest, imprisonment, and having the rest of one’s children taken away.

I’m disappointed that I’ll never get to read that new Dirk Gently book (and whatever other books might have been written) because Douglas Adams died at age 49. And while we’re on the subject, I’m disappointed that Charles Dickens died before he finished the Mystery of Edwin Drood, and that Mark Twain died before he finished the Mysterious Stranger.

I’m disappointed that Doris Day has never won an Academy Award.

Not all my disappointments are big, societal problems, obviously.

My point is that it is easy to get lost in the weeds of disappointment. While some of our disappointments can be quite serious issues, even life-and-death issues, it’s good to take several steps back from those weeds to remind ourselves that there’s an awful lot of good and lovely stuff in the garden of life.

When I was a deeply closeted teen-ager, the very best future I could hope for was that maybe I could hide my non-heterosexuality and possibly find a woman who found me tolerable. I thought it much more likely that I would live out my life alone and unloved. I never dreamed I would meet and fall in love with a man who loved me enough to promise to stay with me the rest of my life (and did). Or that, after his death, I would meet and fall in love with another man who loved me as I was, and that we would not only be able to live together, but do so openly, and eventually stand in front of an assemblage of our friends and loved ones, exchange vows, and legally be pronounced married.

When I was in high school, two classmates who were accused (in separate incidents) of being gay were threatened with expulsion, kicked out of their homes by their parents, and wound up living with relatives in other cities. While many families still kick out their kids (or send them to therapy) if they admit to being gay, we also read stories of kids coming out in high school, junior high, and even elementary school with the full support of their parents. Many schools have straight-gay alliances and policies supportive of non-heterosexual kids.

When I was in my 20s, I was working on a science fiction story in which the President of the United States was an openly gay man, but I set it rather late in the 21st century, and even then, he had only become President because he’d been appointed a second-tier cabinet member, and in the course of a cataclysmic disaster, he was the only person in the line of succession left alive. We don’t have a gay president (and we don’t have any gay cabinet members), but we did have an openly gay man seeking the Republican nomination for President last time around. He appeared on the primary ballot in six states, and in some of them got more votes that candidates who got a lot more media coverage. More importantly, this last election cycle sent six openly gay candidates to the U.S. House of Representatives, an openly lesbian candidate was elected to the U.S. Senate (winning a statewide election), plus 74 openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual candidates were elected to state legislatures, and dozens were elected to city councils, school boards, and other government posts across the nation.

To sum up:

Just 40 years ago, the best future for myself I could imagine was I would be good enough at hiding my true feelings so no one would ever suspect I was gay. It was inconceivable to me that I could actually marry the man I love!

Just 35 years ago, it was inconceivable to me that ordinary schools would allow gay kids to attend openly.

Just 30 years ago, it was inconceivable to me that an openly gay or lesbian person could win elected office other than representing a “gay neighborhood.”

So, which thing that we thought was impossible years ago is going to happen next?

Cousins, part 1

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In The Human Blueprint: The Race to Unlock the Secrets of Our Genetic Script, science writer Robert Shapiro at one point explains that if you pick any two people at random on the street, it’s nearly impossible to go back more than six hundred years before finding a common ancestor. Yes, even if the two people appear to be of completely different races.

There are several caveats, the biggest being that is isn’t impossible, it’s just that the probability has gone down to such an incredibly small number (there were a bunch of zeros between the decimal point and the 1 in the percentage he gave), that for most purposes it might as well be impossible. There are pockets of human population that have been isolated for many more generations than covered in 600 years, of course. But they’re very small.

He also explained how for most of human history most people lived their entire lives within 30 miles of the place they were born, which was usually the same community where both their parents lived, and their parents before them, and so on. So most everyone in a particular community were related to each other, at least distantly.

That doesn’t contradict the previous statement, beacuse all you needed was a small fraction of people to occasionally wander far afield before finding someone to have a family with, and in a matter of a dozen or so more generations, most of the population of said insular community have inherited at least some genes from that one wanderer, and are now all distantly related to everyone back in his old community. They just don’t know it.

Humans have been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years, long before modern technology made world travel and relocation commonplace.

In other words, we’re all cousins, of one sort or another.

Incepting ourselves

history, ,

When I wrote about the inaccuracy of the “You weren’t promised flying cars, you were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia” meme, I elided over a few things. One of which is our collective tendency to misremember and oversimplify.

The flying cars vs cyberpunk dystopia dichotomy is a great example. Given how many friends felt the need to point out to me that Blade Runner, clearly depicting a cyberpunk dystopia, also had flying cars, I’m not the only one to notice this oversimplification. Flying cars and dystopias are not mutually exclusive.

I chose to into interpret “flying cars” as short hand for “utopian future which includes flying cars,” which is why I kept referring to a “flying car utopia” throughout the post. Since “oppresive cyberpunk dystopia” was clearly presented in the original meme as a contrast, I didn’t think it was much of a stretch to assume they meant the two choices as mutually exclusive notions of the future.

The issue I focused on was the age which the meme asserted one must be to have been “promised” the one over the other. I didn’t talk about what prompted so many people to think that the age assertion was reasonable.

The clear implication of choosing 60 as the cut-off was that all that optimisim about the future was only happening in the 1950s. Clearly, such shiny hope couldn’t have existed during the 1960s, when everyone was either protesting the Vietnam war, or rioting over civil rights, or dropping out and tuning in, right?

If that’s what you think the entire 1960s was like, you’ve fallen prey to a massive rewrite of the collective memory.

For instance, the first protest march against our presence in Vietnam was in 1964, but the anti-war movement didn’t become a large scale phenomenon until 1966. Even then, it wasn’t until 1969 that a majority of college campuses had seen protests.

On the other hand, major civil rights events were happening from the mid-50s. Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott were in 1955, not during the 60s. The lunch counter sit-ins and boycotts got underway in 1958 and had given way to other activities by 1960. Yes, the Freedom Rides, Selma, the March on Washington, and the horrors of Freedom Summer in Mississippi (where local authorities teamed up with the KKK using arrests, beatings, arson, murder, and more to drive out the civil rights volunteers and prevents blacks from registering to vote) all happened during the first half of the 1960s, that’s true. But there was plenty of racial civil rights unrest in the 50s, as well.

A lot of the popular culture trends that people ascribe to the 60s didn’t really become widespread until the very end of the decade. As late as 1974, for instance, most public high schools still forbade boys from having long hair. A lot of the clothing styles people think of as 60s is really early 70s.

And what about those 70s? It was all disco fever, with people snorting cocaine between dances, or popping quaaludes while organizing their omnisexual orgies, right? Well, briefly. There is a lot of proto-disco music running from the mid- and late-60s, but the first indisputably disco songs to chart in the U.S. were in 1974. It wasn’t until ’75 that disco music really starting holding its own in popularity, and not really until ’77 that it and the associated styles were dominant. And by that point, the “Disco Sucks” movement was gaining steam, culminating in an anti-disco event that was organized at a baseball double-header, but turned into a riot in 1979. Disco’s time as a defining characteristic of pop culture was only about three-and-a-half years.

Club drugs had always included both cocaine and pills such as Quaaludes, but they definitely were most strongly associated with disco for a while. And while it was true that the enormous gay dance clubs came into being—and straight people going to those gay clubs hit its peak when disco was king—New Wave was the music scene that was most accepting of bi and gay people, not disco.

Another way to look at it: it was no accident when the creators of That 70s Show began their nostalgic recreation of what being a teen-ager in the 70s was like with the week that Star Wars was released (May 25, 1977).

My point is that the entire 1950s wasn’t an idyllic, innocent Pleasantville time. The 1960s wasn’t all strife and discord and a clash of cultures. And the 70s wasn’t all a decadent time of dancing and drugs and hedonism as a reaction to all that seriousness in the 60s. A bit of each was true throughout all three decades.

Future events such as these

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iPad connected to TV to show facetime on large screen.
Jared attending an editorial meeting via FaceTime. (Click to embiggen)
I like living in the future.

We had an editorial board meeting last night, and it being busy, crazy summertime, we almost didn’t have quorum. Fortunately, Jared was able to join us via FaceTime. We’ve done it a couple of times before, propping up my iPad so the person could see most of us. Chuck thought we should do it on the big screen, and I almost never hook the iPad up to the TV, so we did.

Now the future hasn’t quite turned out as we were promised. If I mention “flying cars” certain people will snarkily repeat a meme that’s been going around lately. The first variant I saw was, “Unless you’re 60 or older, you weren’t promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia.”

That’s simply wrong, on many, many levels. The “we were promised {fill in the blank} in the future!” is a reference to things we learned during our childhood from popular culture about what the future would be like. The first appearance of cyberpunk, in any way, shape, or form, was the 1980 novel Web of Angels, by John M. Ford. Therefore, a person who is 59 now, would have been 26 years old when the first hint of a cyberpunk dystopia could have appeared in any popular culture. Twenty-six is not childhood.

The Jetsons, broadcast Sunday nights from 1962-63, reruns Saturday mornings from 1964-73.
The Jetsons, broadcast Sunday nights from 1962-63, reruns Saturday mornings from 1964-73.
I’m still a half-dozen years below 59, and I can assure you that my childhood pop culture did, indeed, promise me flying cars.

The Jetsons was the first show to be broadcast in color on ABC-TV. A cartoon set 100 years in the future, the show ran during primetime beginning in 1962. That’s right, it was not meant to be a children’s show. After it complete its primetime run, the existing episodes were re-run as a Saturday morning cartoon for nearly 10 years. The screen shot is a frame from the opening seconds of the opening theme song of the show. Right there, flying cars. The show depicted a fairly utopian future, with robot maids, devices that could create an entire new outfit, on your body, in seconds, and so forth.

If your childhood included any of the years from 1962-1974, you were, indeed promised flying cars. If we assume one needs to be a minimum of four years old to recall a television series, that means anyone 43 or older can legitimately claim that The Jetsons, at least, promised them a utopian flying cars future.

Jonny Quest floats in midair wearing a jet backpack.
Jonny Quest flying in a jet pack (some of his villains had flying cars).
That time period also included the iconic TV series Lost in Space, the original Star Trek, and Johnny Quest. Not to mention such films as 2001: A Space Odyssey. They didn’t all have flying cars (some had transporters—even better!), but their futures are each the opposite of an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia.

But let’s loop back to that first cyberpunk book. How many people who know what cyberpunk is have even heard of Web of Angels? Most people think of cyberpunk as beginning with either Blade Runner (1982) or Neuromancer (1984). And while Blade Runner is the greatest movie ever made, bar none, the sad truth is it didn’t do well in theaters the first time, and didn’t start developing a cult following until it started appearing on cable in late 1983. So I’m going to say that the beginning of the switch-over to cyberpunk dystopias becoming dominant in pop culture was 1984.

That means 1983 is the last year in which the flying car utopia was promised as a future to kids, so anyone who was at least four in 1983 would be the actual cut-off age, rather than 60, so that means the meme should state: “Unless you’re 34 or older, you weren’t promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia.”

Movie poster from 1985's Back to the Future.
Marty McFly, trying to get back to the future…
But wait! That calculation assumes a very simple binary situation. Cyberpunk dystopias became one possible future in 1984, but it wasn’t the only one. Because in 1985 we got Back to the Future! While the movie primarily follows the adventures of our young hero, Marty McFly, trapped in the 1950s in a time traveling car, trying not to screw up his own future before getting back to his own time. At the end of the movie, Doc Brown goes 30 years into the future, and then comes back, showing off a much upgraded version of the time-traveling car. So, as my friend, Matt, pointed out, if your formative years include Back to the Future, then not only were you promised flying cars, you were promised time-traveling fusion-powered flying cars fueled by household garbage!

So, no, we were promised flying cars!

I’ve had more than one person bring up the fact that Blade Runner had flying cars. I know that. When I said that Blade Runner was the greatest movie ever? Implicit in that statement is the fact that I owned several different cuts on VHS back in the day, and I watched at least two of the tapes so many times that they wore out. I am well aware of the flying cars in Blade Runner. But as I explained on Twitter, the invalidity of the assertion of a dichotomy between flying cars and cyberpunk dystopias is worthy of a posting of its own.

The Last Founding Father

history,

Unlike certain former governors I could name, I can name my favorite Founding Father: Thomas Jefferson. Not only do I have a favorite, I have gotten into debates with friends about why he was the best of the Founders.

But not only do I have a favorite, I also have a second favorite: James Madison. And while I have written about Jefferson many times, Madison deserves some praise.

Madison was the son of a tobacco plantation owner in the colony of Virginia. As the eldest son of a wealthy landowner, he had been tutored in the classics, mathematics, geography, and so on. In college he continued his interest in the classics, also studying Hebrew, philosophy, and law.

It was during this time that his letters to friends began to mention his discomfort with the persecution of Baptists. In Virginia at the time it was illegal to preach without a license from the Church of England (a law that continued after independence, when the Church changed its name to the Episcopal Church, and continued as the official church of Virginia). Madison’s family leaned toward Presbyterianism, though several of his cousins were clergymen in the Church of England, and one became a Bishop. Madison never experienced the sting of this religious persecution personally, but he felt that it was wrong for the law to impose one church upon everyone.

Madison was still a young man when he was elected to the Virginia Colonial legislature. It was as a delegate that he met Thomas Jefferson, with whom he formed a friendly working relationship. Madison remained in the legislature through the war of independence.

After the war, Madison became acquainted with Elijah Craig, a wealthy distiller and a Baptist who had been jailed numerous times for preaching without a license. Madison began working with Craig to introduce laws in the Virginia assembly to protect churches other than the official state church. Jefferson was keen on the idea, but thought Madison was going about it too timidly. When Jefferson began to champion the cause of disestablishing an official state church altogether, Madison threw his support behind it, and eventually the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom was passed.

In 1787, when it became clear to everyone that the weak central government that had been established after the revolution was not working, Madison was one of the delegates to what became the Constitutional Convention. Madison arrived at the convention with an outline for a new government, and it became the starting point. Although the final constitution drafted hardly resembled Madison’s outline at all by the time they were finished, the entire debate had consisted of amending and expanding on Madison’s idea, prompting many to start calling him the Father of the Constitution.

Madison was the source of one of the most brilliant ideas in the Constitution: the notion that two sovereigns meant more liberty, not less. Each citizen is answerable to both their state and the federal government, but each state is answerable to its citizens and to the rest of the states through the agency of the federal government. Similarly the federal government is answerable both to the states and the citizens. If a citizen feels wronged by his state, he can appeal to the federal government, for instance.

Madison was one of the key authors of the Federalist Papers, which were a series of essays explaining why the new Constitution was necessary.

After the Constitution was ratified, Madison was elected to the House or Representatives. Many people repeat the myth that several states ratified the Constitution on the condition that a Bill of Rights (listing specific rights that citizens could never be deprived of) would be added. That’s simply not true. Several delegates of the original Constitutional Convention thought there ought to be a Bill of Rights, but not a majority. During the debates throughout the states during ratification, many of the Anti-Federalists raised the lack of a Bill of Rights as an argument against ratification. In several of the states there were attempts to add a requirement for a Bill of Rights, but not one state actually passed such a requirement.

Madison had been of a mixed mind on the matter. He feared that if a specific list was drafted, future generations might argue that those would be the only rights people had (I’m looking at you, Justice Scalia), but he also worried about what would happen without an explicit list. He worried a lot about the “tyranny of the majority”—the fact that people in the majority could force their views on others, such as the laws that made it a crime to preach one’s religion if one wasn’t certified by the official church.

So, he arrived at Congress with a list, and introduced a bill to amend the new constitution.

Eventually, his list, rearranged and revised slightly, became 12 separate clauses that were passed by Congress and sent to the states. Ten of them were adopted within a few years, the First granting freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, and the right of all citizens to petition the government. The second protected the right to keep and bear arms (though not for the reasons most people think). The third guaranteed that citizens could not be compelled to provide free room and board to soldiers (a source of painful memories shortly after the revolution, which seems a bit odd to us now). The fourth protects against unreasonable search and seizure, requiring warrants with probable cause. And so on, until the tenth, which covered Madison’s big worry by explicitly saying that any power not specifically mentioned in the constitution as belonging to the federal government belongs to the states and to individual citizens.

One other of Mr Madison’s original 12 wasn’t ratified until just over 200 years later, becoming the Twenty-seventh Amendment, limiting changes in salary of members of congress (and in certain circumstances, other officials) from taking effect until a new election of the House of Representatives has taken place.

Madison didn’t like it when people referred to him as Father of the Constitution (even his friend, Thomas Jefferson insisted on calling the document itself, “Mr Madison’s Constitution” for the rest of his life), but he was proud when they called him Father of the Bill of Rights.

Madison later served as Secretary of State when Jefferson was President, and was subsequently elected the fourth President of the United States. He was President during the War of 1812, the prosecution of which changed his mind about the need for the country to have a standing army, as well as a national banking system.

After leaving the Presidency, he retired to the family plantation, which had entered into financial difficulties while being managed by Madison’s stepson.

His last work in government was as a delegate, at the age of 78, to a constitutional convention for the State of Virginia. The primary accomplishment of the convention was to remove the requirement that a man had to own property in order to vote (yes, that was still happening in 1829), but the convention failed to resolve the equal apportionment of delegates in the legislature, which Madison had championed.

Madison’s most famous accomplishment may be the Bill of Rights, but what I admired about him was his passion for increasing liberty and improving the ways government served the people. And I love that he always came prepared with a proposal, but was also always ready to accept revisions in service of the greater goal. He had strong opinions, and spoke both eloquently and passionately for them, but he wasn’t afraid to admit when he had been wrong, and to sincerely change course when necessary.

His philosophy might be best summed up by something he wrote in the Federalist Papers:

It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part… In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger.

By the time he died on June 28, 1836, every other man who is considered a Founding Father of the U.S. had died before him. He was the last Founding Father, but no one could say that he was the least.