Ivory tower pomposity is often used to degrade and demean those with whom we disagree using ostentatious verbosity as a form of abusive ad hominem. Notice the use of "uninformed," which clearly assumes a set a facts not in evidence. It assumes legal, historical and hermeneutical ignorance. No attempts to prove the unfounded assertion were even attempted.

In common parlance original intent is used synonymously with original meaning or public meaning. As Georgetown University Law Professor Lawrence Solum wrote: "Most contemporary originalists believe that the relevant inquiry is into the original "public meaning" of the constitutional provision at issue. Hardly anyone thinks that the intentions, expectations, or purposes of the framer's are independently entitled to interpretive authority--although they may be evidence of original public meaning."

When speaking of SDP, for example, one side may only have knowledge of post Lochner decisions while completely dismissing the many valid Lochner-era decisions or even the pre-Lochner era. Whatever the case, the sort of liberty that William O. Douglas found in the 14th Amendment's SDP was something that most hermeneutical scholars would call eisogesis, reading something into the text that is not there. Why not claim that penumbras and emanations exist in every document? Why not see penumbras and emanations in simple conversations, or food labels, or everything else? It is simply the legal equivalent of spontaneous generation.

Contrary to ignorant declarations that claim Marbury v Madison saw the Constitution as a living document, it needs to be pointed out that there is a modern meaning and an older one. The older definition of "living document" is a document subject to editing and amending. The modern definition is of loose constructionism, which allows the text to have meaning changes as the surrounding culture changes or social demand. The modern form of "living document," or in this case, "living Constitution," goes back to Woodrow Wilson, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis. To conflate the new meaning with the older is to engage in historical anachronism and equivocation. The defender of the "living Constitution" approach wants to engage in a legal form of special pleading and utilize a hermeneutic that is not applied to other legal documents. I have yet to see this approach taken to a restaurant menu or to an automotive repair manual. If I ever witness such an event I hope I have the opportunity to document it to see exactly where the penumbras and emanations are found in the description for a chicken burrito or a plate of linguini.

Those who decry, demean and dismiss valid legal decisions that are perfectly in concert with the original understanding and public meaning of the Second Amendment and others are usually the most flagrant exploiters of definitional distortion such as redefining activism to mean its opposite. It not only reflects a poor understanding of American Constitutional history, but history in general.