The Alabama State constitution strives to provide and protect a wide array of citizens’ rights. Most notably, some of these rights are replicated in the American Bill of Rights. Like the American Bill of Rights, the Alabama State constitution is equally detailed and has different sections that are dedicated to enhancing and protecting citizens’ liberties. The standout element within the Alabama State constitution regarding the protection of rights is the freedom of speech. Within the Bill of Rights, The First Amendment guards the citizens’ freedom of speech as it enables them to not only express themselves through speech but also via protest groups (Weinberger, 2019). The Alabama State constitution echoes similar sentiment as Section 4 prevents the development of any laws that would curtail the citizens’ freedom of speech. To this end, the Alabama State constitution supports the Bill of Rights and emphasizes protecting the freedom of speech for the citizenry.
Both the Fourteenth Amendment and Equal Rights Amendment deal with a similar concept of discrimination. On the one hand, the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted to prevent former slaves from discrimination. Subsequently, black persons who had been formerly enslaved were conferred equal before the law (Young, 2018). On the other hand, the Equal Rights Amendment is an extrapolation of the Fourteenth Amendment as it guarantees equal treatment of all American citizens irrespective of their gender. At the time of its writing, women were often considered second-class citizens and were faced with numerous legal restrictions (Bleiweis, 2020). Therefore, while both the Fourteenth Amendment and Equal Rights Amendment were developed to target discrimination, their scope of application in terms of the people they covered differed as they were based on race and gender, respectively.
References
Bleiweis, R. (2020). The Equal Rights Amendment: What you need to know. Center for American Progress. Web.
Weinberger, L. (2019). The heart of the Constitution: How the Bill of Rights became the bill of rights. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 34(519), 519- 539. Web.
Young, E. A. (2018). Dying Constitutionalism and the Fourteenth Amendment. Marq. L. Rev., 102, 949.