As March Madness nears its climax, basketball fans are embracing the Cinderella team from George Mason University. The Patriots give hope to the underdog – and they give reason for all of us to remember and celebrate the contributions of a remarkable founding father.
George Mason gets less ink in the civics textbooks than such giants of the revolutionary era as Washington, Jefferson and Franklin and others. But he was prominent in his own right – a Virginia planter who pushed to include individual rights in the Constitution.
Mason was a delegate to the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787, but he declined to sign the document, primarily because the original version didn’t contain a declaration of rights. Mason was a leading agitator in the campaign that finally led to the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1792.
The 10 amendments are based largely on the Virginia Declaration of Rights, crafted by Mason in the pivotal summer of 1776.
Today, at a time when expanded government powers under the Patriot Act, electronic eavesdropping without warrants and even such silliness as FBI agents staking out a Denver bookstore have raised deep concerns about America’s civil liberties, it’s worth a salute to Mason. But for his concept of individual freedoms, our constitution would surely not have endured as a beacon of liberty for Americans and across the world.
