Bill Of Rights Assignment

I started my assignment by really reading over the Bill of Rights and thinking really hard. It occurred to me that this was going to be a very tough assignment. Though I don’t think that a lot of the Amendments are upheld much anymore, such as freedom of speech, I could not think of any that needed to be removed or changed. So I started thinking about things that I thought should be added. It came to my attention that I shouldn’t try of think of things that should be added because of personal reasoning, but instead, things that seem to be aggravating a lot of people nowadays. I came up with three. The first thing I thought really needed to be added to the Bill of Rights was the right to marry any person of your choosing. Now I know that
gay marriage is a really touchy subject for a lot of people but I feel like if you love someone it shouldn’t matter what gender they are. It seems to me that the only problem that there is with gay marriage being passed everywhere is that the churches do not allow it. Thomas Jefferson once sent a letter to the Danbury Baptist in 1802 stating “...I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State”. I do not believe that the states should not grant people the right to marry whom they please simply because it is considered an abomination in the church. This is the 21st century and there are so many religions, people following so many different ones and then there are also people, like myself, that do not believe in a “God” or “Creator” or whatever you want to call it. Gay marriage is a choice just as big as a man and woman marrying and if two people make that decision they should be allowed to make it official.
The second thing I came up with for the Bill of Rights is the right to not have to pay for illegal immigrant’s welfare or jailing via state or federal taxes. Are country is in a $14,136,022,715,367 deficit, approximately as of 2/2/11. It does not seem far that some of our money is going into paying for illegal aliens to be jumping the border and living off welfare or being imprisoned and we end up having to pay for them to stay in our prisons and keeping them alive and such. I feel that if a person does not have a green card or was not born into this country by someone who is a legal citizen, they should not be here, making money off us when our country is having a bad enough problem dealing with our own money issues. I’m no expert on finances or on morality but it just seems like it should be every person’s right to not have to pay for people who are in our country illegally. There is an astonishing amount of aliens in our country that live here and manage to con our government out of thousands if not millions of our hard earned money. And lastly, the third thing I could think of that should be in the Bill of Rights is our right to medical care.
There are so many people in our country dying every day because they could not receive medical care because of lack of funds. I was recently almost added to the number of people without medical care. I have two kids, live in Connecticut, and my kids are currently temporarily living with their grandparents. Was forced into homelessness due to the economy’s lack of job availability in my area and had to make the decision to either bring myself and my children to a homeless shelter or let them go live with family while I went to a homeless shelter or a friend’s. When staying at a friend’s house didn’t work, I moved back in with my father and the state of Connecticut threatened to shut off my welfare. They shut off my food stamps because I’m living with my father and are under 22 and almost shut off my health insurance due to the same reasoning. Now, unlike a lot of people out there, I’m lucky in the fact that I don’t have a life threatening disease. But I still require doctor attention unless I want to end up either in a wheelchair, which without money; I wouldn’t be able to afford one and would have to second hand which is never a guaranteed thing. But the fact that our country can afford to be helping people in Africa, Haiti, everywhere around the world with disease but cannot afford to make it a constitutional right for its own citizens to receive medical care is
just unacceptable. It seems to me that our country is more worried about everyone else’s health but its own. I think it’s time that they look at ours and make it a constitutional right. In conclusion, I have personal found that there is three things that our country absolutely needs in its Bill of Rights. As I’ve said, I’m no expert in any way possible, but I feel that if these three things were added, we could be even just a little more well off: The right to medical care; the right to not have to pay money via taxes for aliens; and the right to marry whom we please, regardless of gender. I know that there are many people out there that would not agree with me on these, but as the assignment was to write what I thought should be added, edited, or removed, these are my ideas. Hope you enjoyed reading.

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[ 1 ]. http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9806/danpre.html
[ 2 ]. http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/ maintained by Ed Hall, collaborated with information obtained from the U.S. Department of Treasury dated Jan. 31st, 2011
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