I'm not a fan either, but in a sense we have no choice. We can't ask older generations what they meant, we can only hope that their values were passed on effect

I'm not a fan either, but in a sense we have no choice. We can't ask older generations what they meant, we can only hope that their values were passed on effectively. And where they aren't, we do not share those values and so shouldn't be constrained by them. I don't think we should be reinterpreting the law to suit whatever goal we currently want. That kind of behavior is essentially corruption. We should be rewriting the laws to say explicitly what we want, why we want it, and how important it is to us.