Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
view the rest of the comments
while no explicit mention of secession, the very act of the revolution and statements such as "...Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,–That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…" and "...When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another..."have been used to show the idea the founding fathers supported secession.
Only a handful of times has anyone in the U.S.A. seceded, though most of the times it was just to create a new states in the U.S.A. It was officially outlawed after the C.S.A. seceded and not much of any serious attempt has been made since.
Neither of those are in the US Constitution. Those are from the Declaration of Independence.
That's a far cry from a stipulation that any state unhappy with the union could leave. While the Declaration of Independence is an important founding document of our country, it does not have the force of law.
I would argue secession as it was imagined by the rebel states was implicitly unconstitutional already. That was certainly the position of the Union during the Civil War. You can't guarantee individual rights of U.S. citizens in the Constitution and allow states to free themselves from the obligation to respect those rights by just choosing to secede.
We do have the ability to dissolve the union as envisioned by the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence, but it can't be done unilaterally by any one state. We could do it with a constitutional amendment.
The only other way is through blood and death. As you point out, that hasn't worked so far.