Happy birthday to us! For all our country's faults, for all our shortcomings as a people, nation, and society, there is much good here. Our values -- the ones to which we aspire -- are noble, if perhaps Platonic, given basic human nature even in the early 21st Century.
One of the greatest ideals we have, hold, and struggle to achieve, is freedom of speech and, although it's not specifically mentioned in the First Amendment, freedom of thought.
If, for example, you choose to advocate in this day and age that Galileo was wrong and the Sun revolves around the Earth, you are free and welcome to do so.
My first reaction was, naturally, "Oy, such meshuggenehs!"
Then I realized that there must have been a missing Amendment amongst all the drafts and discards toffed* out in ye olde garbage between May and September 1787. Perhaps one that had been titled Amendment 1(a):
Expression and debate being necessary and beneficial to a free society, even the right to teh stupid shall not be infringed (as some of us know all too well from these debates).
So, amateur historians or astronomers to arms: What other rejected amendments do you think became ale-sodden napkins instead of our foundational document?
* "Toffed?"
That's tossed.
"Well all your esses look like effs here."
It's stylish. It's in, it's very in.
"Oh, well, if it's in..."