Hog, I am not insulted with any of the comments on this board (just in case you were wondering.) As you said, we are all fortunate enough to live in a country which gives us this wonderful freedom to spout off our own views as we wish.
Here is something I was reading (just wanted to spout a bit)-
Having won their independence, the 13 colonies set about the task of forming themselves into a ntaion. The Declaration of Independence had boldly asserted that all men are created equal-a revolutionary sentiment in a world ruled by monarchy and nobles, although America had never had a hereditary aristocracy-yet the new nation was clearly dominated by a landed and mercantile elite, and one-fifth of its total population (one-third in the plantation states of the south) consisted of black slaves. But the revolution liberalized white American society to a significant degree. Primogeniture and entail, which protected large estates from division, were swept away; Anglican and Congregationalist churches lost their privileged positions, paving the way for the complete separation of church and state that would be one of the most radical features of the American constitution; and the electoral franchise was widened in a number of states. These represented concessions won by farmers, frontiersmen, and religious dissidents in return for support of the rebellion. Though America was far from having achieved true egalitarianism and though the cloud of slavery, already troubling to many, hung over its future, it was incontestably the most democratic state in the world and the first since the short-lived English Commonwealth of the 1650s to proclaim the sovereignty of the people, or at least those who were free and male. As such, it was a potent inspiration for reformers in Britain and elsewhere in the Old World, a unique experiment that embodied much of the advanced political thought of the century.