Understanding the Constitution #17: It’s Designed to Foster an Inclusive Society

Jack Evans, 85, and George Harris, 82, together for 54 years, got married in Dallas County, Texas on June 26, 2015, just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled laws prohibiting such marriages unconstitutional.   The framers of the Constitution could never have imagined that moment, but what they set in motion produced it.

There are perhaps no bigger critics of the American form of government than Americans. We’re never satisfied, and that’s often a good thing.  Yet at times we should also acknowledge our success with how we govern ourselves.  Even as he struggled against discrimination, Martin Luther King, Jr. understood this: “The Constitution is an amazing document.  It protects just those people it was meant to exclude: Blacks and women.” 

By the 1780s, America was a hotbed of revolutionary action but certainly not an inclusive society.  Representatives replaced royal decrees but were chosen by a severely restricted electorate.  In many states only white men with property could vote. Women, enslaved African Americans, Native Americans and the landless were denied the franchise – and for many a lot else.  Yet the Constitution established a mechanism that in time moved the nation to correct many of these flaws. 

Delegates to the 1787 Federal Convention understood that all people had natural rights, though they often ignored it in practice.  The Civil War was the tragic result and stands as a warning about future failures to promote and protect an inclusive society.

The Constitution has been amended 27 times to fix some of its failures.  Nearly 40 percent of these amendments deal with including more people in guiding government and guaranteeing their rights to live and act freely. Of six other amendments sent to the states but never ratified, two also dealt with inclusion: the Equal Rights Amendment and giving residents of the District of Columbia the rights of existing states.

None of this happened easily.  The first ten amendments (including 1 and 5 above) were a response to the intense opposition of those who opposed the Constitution because it lacked a guarantee of basic rights.  The Reconstruction Amendments (13-15) emerged from the Civil War to begin to include African Americans as full members of the body politic.  Amendments 17, 19, 23, 24 and 26 were ratified only after popular demands to expand voting rights, especially to those still excluded.

Though these amendments today seem inevitable, they did not at the time.  Two forces in the founding period, however, made a more inclusive society possible.  The Declaration of Independence gave voice to the human hunger for liberty.  The Constitution responded with a process for producing just laws and protecting people through the administration of justice. 

The Declaration is a vision statement, so it is mostly to the Constitution we look to make society more inclusive.  Its most important architecture is the creation of three co-equal branches of government, each with power to protect our rights against depredations by the other branches.  It took Lincoln’s leadership during the Civil War to end slavery when the courts and Congress would not.  It took Congress to grant all women the vote when presidents and courts refused.  It took the Supreme Court to desegregate the nation’s schools when neither the executive nor the legislature would correct this wrong. 

Forgetting this important Constitutional architecture, many Americans strive to give their political party firm control of all three branches of the federal government.  They should rethink that goal. It is contending not concentrated powers that are the greatest protection for the freedoms essential for an inclusive society.  George Washington understood this, when in his Farewell Address he warned: “The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism.”

While the framers were not social psychologists, the Constitution they established is firmly anchored in the now-scientifically established principle that diversity makes for better decisions than uniformity of opinion.  A more inclusive society ensures that varied views will be heard.  That’s the legacy of the founding generation and the Constitution.   Jack Evans and George Harris are just some of its more recent beneficiaries. 

Photo Credit: Back of a 1915 suffrage fan, courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution