The Constitution Means Whatever We Want It To; For Me, That's Beer, Bacon & Big Boobs
Americans have incredible reverence for the Constitution. It is the gleaming jewel at the heart of Democracy, a stirring affirmation of our innate rights as Americans and human beings. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Constitution when it comes to our system of government. It is the alpha and the omega, the light and the way. Other than that weird hiccup where it was seen as one hundred percent compatible with slavery for close to a century and the subjugation and oppression of women for a much longer period of time, it is a perfect document.
One of the primary ways everyday Americans express their love of the constitution is by not reading it or knowing what it contains but acting very aggressively as if they do, particularly in social media dogfights.
Let’s face it: no one has actually read the Constitution. Why would they? It’s boring as fuck. Hell, it’s practically unreadable. Everything is all, “Abraham begat Jebediah, who begat Asriel, who ventured forth with an ass when the Lord commanded him to sacrifice a fattened lamb.”
Who in their right mind would want to read incomprehensible nonsense like that? That might have made sense when George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were collaborating on the Constitution, with assists from Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, FDR, JFK, LBJ, RFK, ODB, BBD and SWV but in 2020 the Constitution’s antiquated language renders it impenetrable.
Because no one has ever bothered to read the Constitution it can mean whatever you want it to mean. For example, if you are a firearms enthusiast who likes nothing more than heading down to the range and shooting a bunch of targets you make-pretend are molotov cocktail-throwing Black Lives Matter and Anfifa radicals then the Constitution is a document whose only important section says that you have the right to blow up Liberals with bazooka launchers if they even think about restricting your god-given, CONSTITUTIONAL right to bear arms.
For gun nuts, the Constitution says that guns are good, and everyone should have them, and some other junk as well, but that’s the only part worth remembering.
For Conservative, evangelical Christians threatened by progress and LGTBQ rights the Constitution’s freedom of religion clause gives them the inalienable Constitutional AND God-given right to discriminate against whoever they’d like on the basis of personal convictions. In their minds, when the exclusively white, male slave owners and misogynists whose foresight and vision guaranteed our freedoms for perpetuity wrote this sacred document they were specifically ensuring their right to not bake cakes for gay weddings.
Hell, there are even true believers who genuinely see Donald Trump a man with a unique and profound understanding of the Constitution that informs everything he says and does. They labor under the delusion that before Trump does something like announce via Twitter that trans people can no longer serve in the military he first makes sure it fits his exacting and very specific conception of Constitutional law.
For some free speech zealots, or rather “free speech” “zealots”, the Constitution and freedom of speech are less about the freedom to say whatever the hell you want than freedom from criticism and consequences. After all, what good is free speech if you might get roasted on Twitter or fired from a gig for saying or doing things people find bigoted or hateful?
Everyone has a different sense of what the Constitution is all about. For me, the American Constitution is fundamentally about three things: beer, bacon and big boobs. Oh sure, it’s about other things as well, like freedom of speech and religion and shit but when the founding fathers wrote the Constitution using a primitive form of Mad Libs they were primarily concerned with ensuring that the cornerstone of American democracy was, and would always remain, cold brews, crispy bacon and bodacious ta-tas seductively showcased in the tightest and tawdriest of skintight, low-cut garb.
Where does my beer, bacon and boob-based interpretation of the Constitution come from? History of course, or at least history as I like to imagine it. People who deny my take on the Constitution ignore clear-cut photographic evidence that indicates that the Constitutional Congress adjourned every day at noon so that its members could head to a nearby strip club for their famous beer and bacon buffet. Patriots like James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and John Rutledge spent HOURS making it rain when not chugging home-brew until they were blackout drunk and literally eating plate after plate of delicious bacon.
The writers of the Constitution, in their wisdom, did not dictate exactly how we should go about our goal of encouraging the production and mass consumption of frosty brews, the devouring of delicious pork products and the display and appreciation of large, shapely female breasts. They trusted us to figure that out for ourselves.
We must honor the wishes of the founding fathers through compulsory study of Russ Meyer movies in high school and college, free breast enlargement surgery across the board and free bacon and beer for every American family, regardless of their religious beliefs or sobriety.
You might think that my conception of the Constitution is ridiculous, and absurdly self-centered, and that I’m only claiming that the founding fathers felt passionately enough about beer, bacon and boobs to write them into the Constitution because I personally happen to like boobs, beer and bacon.
You would not be wrong, of course, but this conception of the Constitution is honestly no more ridiculous than anybody else’s, particularly on the internet. Besides, you should think twice before challenging a self-taught Constitutional scholar like myself on something I know next to nothing about, but nevertheless feel, if anything, excessively qualified to debate publicly all the same.
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