320million has only 535 legislators. There are 435 in the lower House of Representatives but each of the 50 states has just two Senators in the Upper House puting each State on an equal footing in the upper chamber of Congress.
However, simply having a constitution isn’t enough. Violations of basic human rights are commonplace in the US, from innocents being killed by police to domestic spying and wiretapping.
Where Americans have decided to draw the line is to make freedom of speech an absolute. Almost all of us like our First Amendment, even though it causes no end of grief. There’s been recent movement among bigoted conservatives in the US to ban transgender Americans from using the bathrooms appropriate to their actual gender, as opposed to their sex at birth.
One of the sponsors of one of these bills, Tennessee Representative Richard Floyd, once said that if he ever discovered a transgender person using the same facility as his children, he would resort to violence. He said: “I believe if I was standing at a dressing room and my wife or one of my daughters was in the dressing room and a man tried to go in there, I don’t care if he thinks he’s a woman and tries on clothes with them, I’d just try to stomp a mudhole in him and then stomp him dry.”
In the wake of his remarks Floyd is still a member of the Republican Party and was recently re-elected to his seat in the Tennessee Assembly.
Transgender Americans have responded by taking selfies of themselves in the wrong bathroom to highlight the absurdity of transpeople being forced to use the wrong restroom. The “We just need to pee” campaign has made national headlines in the US.
Our absolute commitment to freedom of speech means that racists and hate groups have a right to march around waving
18 May 2015
USS John C Stennis
Nazi flags and chanting horrible things. The most common tactic for dealing with this is through the mediums of clowns and crossdressing. Mocking the hate groups relentlessly when they bother to appear anywhere has been prety successful.
Our entire legal tradition is an atempt to balance dangerously irresponsible personal liberty with a frighteningly overpowered government, representing a population whose national values include oppositional defiant disorder.
We looked at the balance of power arrangements of the 18th and 19th centuries and decided that aſter WWII we ought to try and become the world’s sole superpower. We looked at the British Navy of the 19th century and then built the modern Nuclear-Powered super-carrier. When a US strike carrier enters a region it usually becomes the single largest air-force in the area.
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