this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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What makes those our values? I don't see anything in our founding documents that reflect things like equality in rights and opportunities or social liberalism or economic liberalism.
If you want to acknowledge religious tolerance as described in the Bill of Rights, you also have to acknowledge the 3/5ths compromise.
As far as rationality or democracy, those have never been American values.
Aren't the 18th century human rights part of the early documents or referenced in it?
Sure. And those documents include saying black people are 3/5ths of a person. You can ignore that if you like, I guess.
I'm not ignoring that, I'm trying to answer.
Those documents are major improvements, but there are still not completely extracted from their historical context. For example, the French "Men Rights" willingly ignored the mention of women, despite feminists campaigning for it. Even if some of the influences were impressively progressive philosophers, they were all still pretty damn sexist, which was the norm at this time.
There's no absolute truth for values, people who think there is, are religious people. Best we can do is finding a consensus, the modern Human Rights is the best we have, I think.
Horseshit, you replied to my quote of the Declaration of Independence's preamble where it laid those out
The Declaration of Independence was, again, written before America was a country. It is not a legal document either. And it is religious. So you're saying American values come from a document that was written before there was an America, which expressly was not respecting all religious beliefs but at the same time saying those values can change. It sounds like American values are whatever you believe them to be.