The Founders

 

“Think back to 1787. Who were ‘we the people‘? … They certainly weren’t women … they surely weren’t people held in human bondage. The genius of our Constitution is that over now more than 200 sometimes turbulent years that ‘we’ has expanded and expanded.” - Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

And the "founders" have also expanded. 

Our union was labeled imperfect in the first sentence of its constitution, and thereby we, each succeeding generation, were deputized by the original founders to further its perfecting. 

Barack Obama noted our never-ending  founding in remarks after the groundbreaking Supreme Court ruling that allowed for expanding our fundamental rights to include same-sex marriage: "Our nation was founded on a bedrock principle that we are all created equal. The project of each generation is to bridge the meaning of those founding words with the realities of changing times — a never-ending quest to ensure those words ring true for every single American."

So, in America, "Founding Fathers" are not only those bewigged aristocratic white men of colonial Virginia and Massachusetts and New York who fought the Revolution and forged the great compromises of 1787. They are also the cruel and rough Jackson, the log-cabin sage Lincoln, the formerly enslaved Tubman and Douglass, the fierce mother Stanton and the fierce never-married Anthony, the labor leaders of the progressive era, the stubborn TR and his crippled but happy warrior distant cousin FDR, Brandeis, Warren, Ike, LBJ, King, Friedan, Carter, Reagan, Scalia, and many many others.

Slight, quiet, collegiate, but fiercely principled and brilliant Ruth Bader Ginsburg is one of the greatest founders of our generation. God bless her memory and may her words be considered by our lawmakers and justices and future founders for generations to come.