As I’ve been saying for years:
The Charter of Rights and Freedoms was thrown together a few years ago by a bunch of mediocre lawyers, some of whom were actually French.
We’re not talking Thomas Jefferson or John Adams here. With the exception of Trudeau, no one behind the Charter was smarter than I am (let alone inspired by God) and certainly not smart enough to tell me how to live.
It. Doesn’t. Matter. What. It. Says.
The Charter has as much import and impact upon my life as the instruction manual that came with my microwave.
Stop living your life as if this useless scrap of paper has any power or meaning.
Anyhow, Mark Steyn responds to Justice “Sleepy” Ginsberg (along with the disgusting Prop 8 decision) at The Corner:
If that’s insufficiently legalistic, I’ve also described it as “a worthless piece of junk.” By design, it excludes property rights, which Locke, Montesquieu, and other irrelevant dead guys all saw as an indispensable condition for liberty. It embeds identity-group preferences as a constitutional principle.
And it empowers hack bureaucrats to determine the appropriate balance between genuine rights such as free speech and the pseudo-“rights” doled out by the state’s social engineers. It represents, as do many of the more fashionable constitutions admired in the Times piece, a precise inversion of the definition of “rights.” (…)
It seems pretty clear from today’s Ninth Circuit decision that Americans increasingly live in, if not quite yet a post-constitutional republic, at any rate a post-modern one.
