PRESS RELEASE

July 31, 2007

A BILL OF RIGHTS FOR 21^ST CENTURY AMERICA

It is time to drastically expand and restructure our Bill of Rights, according to Joe Coates, who spoke at the World Future Society’s 2007 meeting in Minneapolis. Coates, a well-known futurist, hopes is to begin a broad public discussion of the need for, and the framing of, new amendments, to reflect the drastic changes in American life continuing into the 21^st century. 

His talk, “A Bill of Rights for 21^st Century America,” is drawn from his just published book of the same name.

The current Bill of Rights reflects the concerns and fears of a new nation, emerging from the colonial period, facing a turbulent future and anxious that the hard-won rights implicit in English Common Law not be lost under a radically structured new government.

The Bill of Rights brilliantly responded to the forces and trends of late 18^th Century America. These principles have been re-interpreted and expanded over two hundred years of social change, to protect our democratic values and aspirations. But the first ten Amendments to the Constitution (and additional rights defined in later amendments) are increasingly inadequate in coping with the complexities of our modern world.

Coates proposes a radical (root) enhancement of the Bill of Rights to deal with the changes in the last half century that are continuing into the future, along with emerging new issues.

 Resistance to his proposals, Coates recognizes, will be strong. The Bill of Rights is sacred to many people and hence untouchable. But just as The Bill of Rights responded to forces and fears in our post-colonial new nation, today the scope, scale, and growing complexity of our society calls for the explicit recognition of new rights.

 Trends that transform our society require that we recognize and frame new rights related to family, work, education, health, privacy, international movement, timely information about what government is doing, drastic improvements in our system of justice, and the re-establishment of equality among voters. Those rights can only be assured through the addition of a bundle of new amendments to the great old ten.

Among the most powerful drivers of change, emphasizing the need for explicit new rights, are demographic change, environmental realities, the ubiquity of information technology, a cornucopia of benefits from science and technology, especially in medicine and health, the stress of changing social mores, complexity in everything everywhere, the stress on natural resources, the radical reorganization of work, globalization and other international issues, old and new forms of conflict, violence, and criminality, and the competing uses of our time.

For example, family life has radically moved away from that of the autonomous, small, rural community. Urbanization nearly wipes out the extended family, a social support structure, while the attractions in the city raise wages, open up new life styles, provide different kinds of work, and provide most of the support structure for health care and retirement through business or governmental programs framed around the family as the key social unit. That unit now is being radically changed in all the ways so familiar to us, but the benefits are still largely framed around the traditional family. We must recognize, in fairness to all citizens, that access to security, retirement, and health benefits must be divorced from the concept of the conventional family and provided to all, whether gay partnerships, shacking up, in a common law arrangement, polygamy, group living, or other forms of  living arrangements.

 A rigid commitment to a Judeo-Christian model of the family deprives many of crucial benefits, and in addition may directly violate the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. 

The Electoral College process, good in the colonial period, now distorts the time, attention, resources, and scope of discussion by presidential candidates in far too long campaigns. It should be abolished and be replaced by direct voting, which would give every citizen’s vote equal weight. To further acknowledge voters’ importance, the amendment would reduce campaign time and drastically reduce interest group financial support.

Two proposed amendments, Assured Employment and Useful Education, deal with two of the most troubling questions in the modern world.  “Every American citizen,” Coates argues, should be “entitled to employment up to age 70, commensurate with his or her physical, mental, and  educational status. Where the market economy cannot supply that employment, the government will.”  And “every citizen and resident, without a prohibiting physical, emotional, or intellectual deficiency, is entitled to an education commensurate with his or her abilities that will provide the competence and skills for employment for a reasonable fraction of his or her work life.”

A proposed amendment, “A Reformed Judicial System,” is based on the reality that our fundamentally adversarial legal apparatus fails to deliver evenhanded justice in our complex society, and should be largely replaced by non-adversarial processes.

Other proposed amendments deal with privacy in the information technology age, unimpeded international travel, open government, and freedom from torture.

These amendments are not proposed as “the last word,” but rather as a basis for starting a sweeping public discussion of the issues, taking advantage of traditional and modern means of public information exchange, culminating in several alternative ways to establish a number of amendments simultaneously. The method common up to now—one amendment at a time—can take decades. We do not have the time to make root changes through the one-by-one process.

The book, [ISBN 978-1-4196-6532-5], published by the Kanawha Institute for the Study of the Future, is available for $12.99 from The World Future Society, Amazon.com, Borders.com, Target.com, Alibris.com, AbeBooks.com, or from the Kanawha Institute for the Study of the Future (orders@kanawhainstitute.com).