Quote:
Originally Posted by Molon Labe
There is no point in having a constitution unless its meaning is constant. The purpose of a constitution establish the boundaries of a government's power. It is a contract between the people and the government. If the government gets to change those limits, to change the terms of the contract whenever they see fit, the document is a joke.
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Not whenever they see fit, it should be beyond the reach of daily politics and individuals' opportunistic interests, yes. But it must be possible to change it nevertheless, because any constitution always is beign formed from the context of the time in which it was created. But you want high hurdles for that, yes. If you ban the poption to chnagea cojmnstitution alltogether, then you fix it for centuries and millenias to comem in ignorrance of all chnbage taking place - and then it is only a question of time before the rules of such a constitition form a tyranny in itself. everything in nature changes, constantly, and we must adopt to these changes. If we supress chnage alltogether and deny it, we cause stagnation, standstill, lacking developement, and finally death.
That is true for religious text that claim eternal validity and everlasting truth. And that is true for poltiical law-sets and constitutions as well. A content of such texts may be fitting in the beginning, or not, and text's quality may differ in ther speed at which they loose validty. But falling out of the contexts that created the thinking behind these texts they all do. Even the German or the American constitution or the Code Napoleon or the German BGB, even the Bible or the Quran.