 Second, no proponent of the fixed view will deny that the abstract moral commitments expressed in a constitution tend to be widely, if not universally shared among members of the relevant political community. In that sense, then, the constitution, despite the moral commitments it embodies, is neutral as between citizens and their many more partisan differences of opinion on more particular moral questions. Not everyone in a modern, constitutional democracy like the US or Germany agrees on the extent to which the right to free expression demands the liberty to express opinions that display and promote hatred toward an identifiable religious or racial group. But virtually no one would deny the vital importance of expressive freedom in a truly free and democratic society. On fixed views, then, constitutions can be seen as analogous to the ground rules of a debating society. Each sets the mutually agreed, stable framework within which controversial debate (and action) is to take place. And just as a debating society could not function if its ground rules were constantly open to debate and revision at point of application, a constitution could not serve its role if its terms were constantly open to debate and revision by participants within the political and legal processes it aspires to govern. We avoid this result, according to those whose espoused the fixed view, to the extent that we are able to replace controversial moral and political questions with historical questions about the intentions of constitutional authors in creating what they did, or about how the language they chose to express a constitutional requirement was publicly understood at the time it was chosen.