Our civil liberties are protected by the Bill of Rights which was created to place restraints on our national government. The Bill of Rights is our first ten amendments in the U.S. Constitution. “…bear in mind that the Bill of Rights, like the rest of the Constitution, is relatively brief. The framers set forth broad guidelines, leaving it up to the courts to interpret these constitutional mandates and apply them to specific situations,” (64). What many did not realize was that the Bill of Rights would only apply to the national government. The first amendment set the grounds for our civil liberties by protecting our freedom of speech, religion, expression and petition. Like most of the documents that the framers created, the first amendment
