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A recent challenge by a newsmaker to "read the Constitution" is a worthy provocation. Orders from Amazon for copies of the document reportedly have risen in the wake of the statement. The more the Constitution is studied, the better. It is remarkably short, clear and direct. The following is a portion of writer Jameson Parker's answer on his blog to a person who disagrees with Parker's position against altering the nation's foundational law. Parker's elegant response resonates with Forde Files. Used by permission.

The US Constitution was written precisely to protect your God-given, "unalienable rights [including] life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Those rights, and the liberties enumerated in the Constitution, were not passé when Aristotle wrote about them 2300 years ago, nor will they be passé 2300 years from now. The founding fathers knew both from history and from bitter experience that those rights could be taken away, either by sudden violence, or by gradual erosion, and they designed and crafted the Constitution as a bulwark to protect those rights, both by delineating certain liberties-liberty to worship as we choose, to speak our minds, to own property, to defend ourselves, and so on-and, at least as important, by severely curtailing the reach of government and limiting its power over those liberties. The founding fathers realized the necessity of that bulwark because they knew what so many seem to have forgotten today: that man's essential nature is immutable.

To deny that is to deny both human nature and the laws of evolution Look around.

Where do you see man so evolved that you can safely dispense with your liberties? In any of the strains and permutations of radical Islamic terrorism? Indeed, anywhere in the Levant other than Israel? In China's saber-rattling and expansion of territory into international waters? In North Korea's development of one nuclear weapon after another? In Iran's quest for their own nuclear weapons, or in their stated desire to wipe America and Israel off the face of the earth? On the continent of Africa, where tribal animosities still erupt into the kind of wholesale bloodshed that occurred in Rwanda? In which corner of the globe will you hide with your rights, after you have relinquished your liberties and due process to the use and misuse of mere men who have all the same evolutionary instincts for good or ill as the rest of us? Or do you believe America is somehow immune from the laws of nature and evolution? Man is what he is, and the Constitution reflects man as he is, not as we would like him to be.

Jameson Parker

July 1, 2016