Still working through the cold and the books on the US Constitution and I was struck by a passage on what are called unenumerated rights. In the 1791 addition of the Bill of Rights to the US Constitution it says at Amendment 9:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

It is interesting to note that the US Courts have only rarely relied on this provision. By comparison, under our Canadian Constitution our list of Charter rights protected by section 15 against discrimination by the state is open-ended and has actively been used to allow for unenumerated rights to be recognized, such has been the case with same-sex marriage not to mention that old chestnut political belief. A similar process can be seen in the developement of new meanings in words like "liberty" which we in Canada are currently expanding though sometimes unclearly and which the US Courts use far more often to describe new circumstances of rights recognition.

Under both constitutions, even with our living tree and our neighbours' lean to originalism, it is difficult to pinpoint the place we expressly find the rights of privacy, family interest or many others we assume are present and politicians would proclaim as fundamental - fundamental as to the nature of a free person. It is interesting to consider that the extent of this core notion to our democracies is still being worked out - revealed, not created - in large part based on ideas that Voltaire and others who influenced the framers of the US Constitution in the 1700s while at the same time elsewhere tyrannies are slowly but surely getting the boot one by one.