Question

(American government)

What is the meaning of equality? How has its meaning changed since the writing of the Constitution of 1787?

Answer 1

Equality is equal status or quality; correspondence in quantity, degree, value, rank, or capability:Starting with the cases of race relations in the late 1950s and culminating in the cases of gender equality in the 1970s, faith in constitutional rights has generally resulted in a comprehensive judicial creation of rights, including fundamental rights such as the right to die and the right to sexual expression and less important ones such as the right to play 19 Thus, the route to progress fell under the guardianship of lawyers and judges.

But at each of these periods important developments occurred. In 1938 a new concept of equality arose that centered on culture and ethnicity rather than gender, and the pursuit of such equality became the core aim of liberal constitutionalism. In turn, Brown marked the first clear proclamation of equality as a lawfully enforceable, formal constitutional right rather than a mere objective. Finally, the mid-1960s represented the era in which the lower courts permeated rights-centered rather than goal-oriented jurisprudence, and equality was multicultural rather than assimilatiomst.

The egalitarian ideology of today also does not impose the special burden of shedding their cultural identities on subordinate classes in order to climb to the top. All cultures will receive due respect in today's utopia, and no culture will be the dominant one that all others need to be assimilated to. Nonetheless, racial tolerance opposes the very notion of superiority, or the very idea of rising to the top, in its most advanced forms.
Egalitan multicultural rights somehow presuppose that each fair community should maintain its own values and culture and relate to others without a single culture or set of values being dominant.