The Bill of Rights

Tue, 22 Jul 2003 19:47:00 +0000

Huckleberry Finn, so far as we know, had not read the First Amendment. Here he was in anguish because he was harboring the runaway slave Jim. Knowing that he was breaking society's rules and sure that God disapproved, he wrote Jim's owner, Miss Watson, to turn him in. But he recalled their adventures on the river and Jim's kindness then, and he could not bring himself to mail the letter. He tore it up, certain that he would be damned forever: "All right, then," Huck said to himself, "I'll go to hell."

The passage is more than wonderful literature. Only when Huck let his mind travel did he discover what he really thought about equality. The First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of expression, allows that free flight, that necessary journey of self-discovery. In the words of one of its staunchest champions, Justice Hugo L. Black, that amendment -- along with the nine others that make up the Bill of Rights -- protects, or attempts to protect, "individual liberty by barring government from acting in a particular area or from acting except under certain prescribed procedures." Its framers had seen numerous examples of human depravity, abuses of governmental power by colonial authorities, that led them to build indestructible walls limiting government.

Salon.com > Roger K. Newman

The Bill of Rights