BETWEEN PATRIARCHY AND DEMOCRACY: CONTRADICTIONS IN AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONALISM

When Amish school girls were raped and killed in 2006, Bob Herbert asked in the New York Times why seemingly no one had questioned whether this was a hate crime against women. His point was that had the target been African-Americans or Jews, the charge of hate crime would surely have followed. Our intention is not to pit one irrational prejudice against another but rather to observe how much we still live between democracy and patriarchy. The founding of American constitutional democracy was informed by a consciousness of the many experiments both in republican government and in forms of a federal state, including republican Rome with its balanced constitution and its growing empire. Vergil's Aeneid was read by the Founders in their studies at university, and the founding of Rome was one of the historical precedents they had in mind in establishing the American republic in the Constitution of 1787, amended by the Bill of Rights of 1791.

The Great Seal of the United States, adopted in 1782, consists of an American bald eagle holding an olive branch in his right talon and a bundle of thirteen arrows in his left. His beak carries a scroll inscribed E Pluribus Unum. The reverse shows an unfinished pyramid and an eye in a shining triangle.