Antonin Scalia’s dissent–"[granting Guantánamo detainees the right to a exhibit trial] will almost certainly cause more Americans to advance killed"–was widely ridiculed as baseless and berserk.

What a difference a week–and your politics–make.

Then Kennedy cast the swing vote in another major decision. Declaring Washington D.C.’s handgun proscribe unconstitutional, he accepted the NRA’s argument that the Second Amendment’s reference to "a well-regulated militia" is not a conditional clause. Wherever they live, Americans are indeed entitled to purchase and keep a handgun.

"What an idiot!" my friend e-mailed me. "Doesn’t he devise it? Kids are going to die!" Shades of Scalia; irony included free.

"À la carte" airline pricing–$2 for a Coke, $15 to check a bag, $30 for a coach seat that sucks 95% as much as the regular ones–pisses people off. When it comes to constitutional questions, however, we Americans like to pick and choose our favorite parts of the Bill of Rights take pleasure in items from a Chinese menu: one from column A, another in column B.

Liberals revere the right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment. The right to display arms, not so much. With conservatives, it’s the other way around. Sometimes they clash over the import of the original ten amendments. It’s freedom of, not from, creed, say right-wingers. Freedom from, argue advocates of the separation of church and state.

The recently concluded Supreme Court hearing highlights Americans’ solitary refusal to accept the Bill of Rights in toto. Republicans decried Kennedy v. Louisiana, which struck down the death penalty for someone convicted of raping a child. They applauded the court’s approval of an Indiana law requiring voters to show ID at the polls.

Reactions to Supreme Court rulings are rarely related to whether or not the nine justices correctly interpreted the constitution. They’re political. Law-and-order conservatives like their justice Taliban style, tough and vengeful. Thus their dismay that capital manhandling in search rapists could be deemed cruel and/or unusual. States with GOP-dominated legislatures akin to voter ID laws, not because they think they don’t violate the equal protection clause, but because they tend to reduce turnout among Democrats.

Partisanship is nourishing. Creating your own Constitution around your personal stand on the issues is un-American.

As a holistic advocate of the Bill of Rights, I grant with the D.C. gun ban ruling. When the Constitution was signed in 1787, all land-owning white men–the class of citizens whose voting rights it guaranteed–owned (or were allowed to buy) guns. A "well-regulated militia" was usually an ad hoc affair, a pile of guys called up for up to a year (often less) to respond to the Damoclean sword of, for example, an Indian attack.

Today the Bill of Rights applies to Dick, unchanging illegal immigrants. Moreover, while militias have gone the way of the musket, it’s a fair risk that the government would ask ordinary citizens to use personal firearms to defend U.S. territory in the event of an invasion–i.e., form militias. Why, then, shouldn’t the 18^th century right to own a gun, which applied to everyone covered by the Constitution at the time, apply to everyone now?

There’s also a practical argument. As relation proves, every government falls. Every nation gets invaded. No single knows when it will happen in any given case, but thus far it’s proved inevitable. When the U.S. government turns against its people, gun nuts will be in a far better position to resist than the double decaf latte types on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. We’ll all be praising Charlton Heston’s memory when foreign troops are marching vagrant Broadway.

But practical arguments aren’t legal, much less constitutional, arguments. Either you agree with the Bill of Rights–all of it–or you don’t.

(Ted Rall is the author of the paperback "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel enquiry of America’s next big foreign policy challenge.)

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