Women did not have the right to vote till 1920. Why not before? Blacks were not treated equally under the law till 1964. Why not before?

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- With out god, life is everything.
- God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller as time moves on..." Neil DeGrasse Tyson
- You can pray for me, I'll think for you.
- When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

In the end it was because of the general Will of the People. When the general Will of the People changed that stuff changed.

The question for Me is; is the general Will of the People always good for the Country in general and the same with Legeslation.

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In these cases the general will of the people effected about 51% of our population in the first example and about 12% in the second.

These are taxpaying Americans we are talking about here and I really don't think the will of the people has much to do with it. The supreme law of the land is the US Constitution and how it effects the lives of Americans is what is important.

If we are to run this place depending on the will of the people then what do we need a Constitution for?

That is a nice idealistic thought. If at the end of the Civil War the Public had demanded that the Negros get full rights as Citizens the Government would have had to do that. But, instead most of the White People in the Country including a good deal of the Anti-Slavery People did not want and in fact prevented the Negros from having the same rights as themselves. All that despite CONUS.

And, then along with that was no Vote for Women even though there was at least one State that allowed Women to Vote at that time.
Neither of the above are isolated or extreme examples of CONUS being disregarded because the General Population supported that.

In My opinion as Religion became less important to the Population in General they started insisting on a different definition of the separation of Church and State than had been previously practiced.

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So the Constitution is just a piece of paper?

Actually until someone makes an issue of something then it is not an issue. The final judge of our laws must always be the Constitution. This is playing out in a lot of southern states with gay marriage laws being overturned when they show up in court.

And during the era of passing laws and making state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage there was really no onslaught of gay marriages about to overrun the country. There was a guy named Karl Rove who taught that if you wish to drive the sheep to the polls you need to crank up an emergency, declare that the sky is falling and wait for the polls to reflect that a lot of fearful Conservatives had flooded the voting booths and, while they were there, also voted Republican.

Now those laws might have represented the will of the voters, but one after another they are being found to be unconstitutional.

So should they be kept on the books just because they represent which way the wind is blowing?