Chronology correlates with importance here. IIRC, however, the Bill of Rights was passed as a whole, though, not piecemeal. So it could be that it's 2nd because the Founding Fathers thought it was important. "Security of a free State" and all that. Seems pretty important to me.
I mean that's kind of interpretrative. I could similarly say that it wasn't in the Constitution to begin with so it can't have been that important to them. Or that it came before they thought about giving basic rights to anyone who isn't a white man so maybe we shouldn't read too closely into the order or rely on someone from the 18th century to inform our priorities.
Oh, they have thought about it, and very early on at that. When Jefferson was drafting the Declaration of Independence, it had this bit in it:
"He [king] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce."
This was removed from the final version during committee review. Much later, Jefferson explained what he believed the reason for this was:
"The clause...reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in compliance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under these censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others."
The supreme irony here, of course, is that Jefferson himself was a slave owner until his death. And he had something to say on that, as well; written in 1820, on the occasion of the Missouri Compromise:
"... as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."
the constitution, as written, recognized the same rights for all men. The institution of slavery/discrimination was at odds with what was written from the very beginning
Not women, though. Multi-century statecraft is a long, iterative process. The founding fathers were hardly perfect, and that doesn't detract from the scope of achievement.
I agree, the characters behind the writing and their faults are irrelevant. The ideas are what matter, and they should be timeless or they need to be updated, eg. for women
