Bill of Duties Revisited

Fellow blogger John A invited me to respond to the Bill of Rights with a corresponding Bill of Duties. I started to write up some legaleze-sounding gibberish that directly responded to the first two ammendments to the Constitution. As I was explaining the verbage, I quickly realized that I was trying to write something that told people to just behave themselves, for crying out loud.

But what qualifies as good behavior? As a Catholic, the answer popped into my head immediately: the ten Judeo-Christian commandments. A quick check on the web tells me that Islam also adheres to the essential points of the ten commandments. I was happy to see mention of things in the Qur'an such as "Keep one's promises" and "Be honest and fair". Those sorts of things are described in the Judeo-Christian Bible as well, just not as part of the ten commandments. These are our duties as citizens of a community.

If I had responded to the Bill of Rights point by point, I would have established limits on freedoms with the intent of avoiding social damage produced by excessive use of those freedoms. Such statements would originate in a desire to have citizens do no harm. That's known as the Silver Rule: Commit No Harm. A nation with the potential of America must rely on a finer, more demanding metric, the Golden Rule: Do Good Works.

It's not enough to say that what you're doing isn't hurting anyone. You must do things that help the community. A community only operates while its members are committed to the community above themselves. Look to anyone in your community who builds that community and you'll find someone who acts for the improvement of the community. They spend their time on the well-being of the community instead of spending it on themselves. Alas, we were given the Bill of Rights, which emphasized self without an equal or greater emphasis on the health of the community. That encouraged Americans to think in terms of personal freedoms and liberties without a commensurate consideration of the needs of the community.

So if I were making ammendments that were needed to establish a bill of duties, it would include things like telling the truth, respecting others, taking care of one's own health, pursuing one's own maturation, participation in community, etc, etc, etc. All the things that we were taught in kindergarten, before we got so clever and decided to focus on pursuing our civil liberties to extremes.

Ultimately, the founding fathers missed the mark. They believed that people were fundamentally Christian in demeanor, and that liberties could be granted to them without fear of an erosion of the society. Ultimately, society has flexed and twisted so much over the past 200 years that our freedoms have burdened us as terribly as the overbearing rule of a monarch.