Reply #10: My experience.

[Igel]

Strict constitutionalists say that the Constitution is a piece of paper with words on it with a very well defined mechanism for changing the words. If you want to make it mean something else, use the process that the Constitution says to use and change the words. Don't look for the likely inferences produced by mixing in certain proportions different emanations of contradictory penumbras. They may not like individual amendments; but amendments as a mechanism for change they love.

A reasonable number have also been religious conservatives, simply because there's a cross-correlation between compelling one document to have always meant what you've just realized it really should mean to make the world jut and compelling a different document in the same manner. Conservatives tend to be hubristic when it comes to imposing shop-worn tradition that has failed numerous times on others; liberals tend to be hubristic in imposing what they found in their morning lattes on others, convinced that since it's new it must be better. (How's that for an even-handedly offensive generalization?)

Get to those who are uneducated--a cross-cutting category, whatever stereotypes may say--and you find that both pick and choose exactly which points in each document are to be enforced strictly and which aren't. When pressed on the point, they usually collapse to "strict construction" in both cases; they're just unconcerned with injunctions against what they want to do and fail to notice such injunctions.