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- Jan 12, 2005
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Really? You do realize, of course, that included in the time you show are slavery for the first 89 or so years of our country's existence, and Jim Crow for all nonwhites afterwards...and women could not vote until something like 1921. And let's not forget that LGBT's basically had zero rights until public opinion finally began shifting in the 1990's.
But of course if we consider only white heterosexual males, you're right that it was freer then than it is now.
There is nothing whatsoever one can say to condone or justify slavery. And nobody in that first American Congress presumed to do that. What they did presume to do is to allow the various states the freedom to be who and what they were, the first Americans to be who and what they were, so that a cohesive strong nation could be formed. The Founders knew that freedom required the right to be wrong as well as right and trusted a free people who governed themselves to make mistakes but learn from them, and eventually get it more right than wrong.
So yes, here and there you had pockets of culture we all...that is ALL of us....would not condone today. For instance, there were very restrictive and demanding little theocracies in some of the colonies. But without any pressure or requirement from the Federal government, pretty much every one of them had voluntarily dissolved by the turn of the century never to reappear again.
Likewise slavery persisted in some places for some time, but there was increasing criticism and pressure to end it. Had there been no Civil War, it might have taken a little longer, but America would have ended slavery voluntarily just as Canada and Mexico had done before it. And it would have been without a bloody, devastating civil war and without so much trauma for the slaves who were made freemen. There are shades of gray in just about all public policy.
Public opinion has always been a component of a free society. And it generally usually gets it right if left to run its course. It is only when the Federal government presumes to dictate what public opinion is required to be that we start seeing government assign our rights instead of us exercising our rights, and that always results in erosion and sometimes destruction of those same rights.