> The rights which are in danger need to be bundled so that the whims of a particular time and place do not permanently sacrifice a right.
If the people who wrote the constitution had such a good grasp of what the correct fundamental rights were, why did they allow slavery to happen? Why did they only allow land-owning white males to vote? If they were not morally infallible, and we accept that their opinions on those issues were justifiably superceded by future generations, then why are we not allowed to critically examine the rights enumerated in the constitution and question which of them are no longer tenable today, instead of a priori dismissing any possible challenge to the constitution as a stupid "whim of a particular time and place".
My argument was that, if you want to keep a right protected from government, bundling it into a list (like the Bill of Rights) is a good approach.
I never said that the Bill of Rights covers all possible rights or that the founders were infallible.
Your question about slavery is misguided. The founders were forming a union out of pre-existing states. It was not the founders' intent to interfere with states much at all. Only certain parts of the Constitution prohibit powers to the states, and before the 14th Amendment, the states were not as tightly bound even by the Bill of Rights (e.g. the 1st Amendment starts "Congress shall pass no law...").
The idea that you can form a union of 13 colonies and also make demands of them at the same time goes against the whole idea of the Constitution. The Constitution is a framework, and it only protects rights that were already widely regarded as rights before the union (for instance, the right to bear arms wasn't just made up for the Constitution, similar things existed in many state constitutions already).
The Constituion is amazing not because it was perfect from day one. It is amazing because it expressly limited the power of the government that it was creating (the federal government), and because it turned out to be a surprisingly resilient framework. The Bill of Rights is amazing because it got a surprising number of things right.
Going back to the original article, the 1st and 4th Amendments are still radical after 200+ years.
We can re-examine the 1st, 2nd, 4th, or whatever Amendment you want. But they seem like a good list to me, and once one is lost it is unlikely to be regained peacefully (because losing a right grants power to the government, amd governments don't like to give up power). Majority opinions do fluctuate a lot and if a simple majority could give up the rights of everyone, the entire Bill of Rights would be long gone.
Murder rates have declined dramatically since the founding and still seem to be declining or steady. So I don't want to give up the 2nd Amendment just because we have more media noise about guns, nor the 1st/4th Amendment because police have a harder time decrypting messages now. I find it weird to call rights "untenable" when everything is getting better, not worse. Like, what exactly is the big problem with freedom that it was somehow "tenable" before but now it's not?
If the people who wrote the constitution had such a good grasp of what the correct fundamental rights were, why did they allow slavery to happen? Why did they only allow land-owning white males to vote? If they were not morally infallible, and we accept that their opinions on those issues were justifiably superceded by future generations, then why are we not allowed to critically examine the rights enumerated in the constitution and question which of them are no longer tenable today, instead of a priori dismissing any possible challenge to the constitution as a stupid "whim of a particular time and place".