What the Constitution Means to Me

Content Warning: This guide includes discussions about domestic violence, violence/rape against women, incestuous rape, child abuse, human trafficking, and abortion.

“This is why it’s such a radical document. Two hundred and two years ago, a bunch of magicians came together during a sweltering summer day in Philadelphia, and they wanted to murder each other, but instead they sat down and performed a collective act of ethical visualization. Or as I like to call it: a spell.”

Heidi, as her teenaged self, tends to romanticize the Constitution with the same ideals that lead many people to romanticize the country’s so-described founding fathers. Her notion of the magic spell stems from her use of the crucible as a metaphor due to her current interest in the Salem Witch Trials, in which notably, the “witches” she is using as a comparison were mostly disempowered women. The framers of the Constitution were educated men with disparate belief systems and often inflated egos, and perhaps it is amazing that they managed to produce a document that remains relevant two centuries later.

“People laughed at Douglas for calling [the 9^th amendment] [a penumbra], but I like it. I think it’s a helpful way to think about the Constitution and maybe even about our lives. Here we are, trapped between what we can see, and what we can’t. We are stuck in a penumbra.”

Heidi calls the 9th amendment “the most magical and mysterious amendment of them all” (17). Justice Antonin Scalia admitted at one point that he finds it inscrutable, and he doesn’t think it was covered in law school. The amendment states that just because a right isn’t explicitly stated in the Constitution, that doesn’t mean that Americans don’t have that right. Therefore, the Constitution should not be used as a way of excluding or taking away rights, leaving room for the future and needs of the country that can’t be imagined yet.