Here's the thing about the U.S. Constitution. It in many ways remains, 231 years after its drafting, a document worthy of reverence — thanks to its first 10 amendments, the Bill of Rights — because of its freedoms to protest, worship and commit acts of journalism. It also established a new, representative form of government when most of the world was still ruled by kings who crushed any peasant rebellions. But our classroom indoctrination into the notion of American Exceptionalism can blind us to the Constitution's flaws. Yes, some key clauses are probably outdated, but the bigger problem rests with America's original sin: Too much of our system of government was created to preserve a morally indefensible system of human bondage: slavery.