Section 1 is literally just "ignore everything below this section".

If they're not absolute, they're not rights. It's a feel-good document that protects jack shit.

Au contraire, taking rights as if they're defined absolutely means that conflicts between them cannot be resolved equitably, but rather only axiomatically. In this US, this plays out as most natural rights being undermined through inescapable interactions with corpos, with the justification that you've "voluntarily" agreed that you will not exercise your right. There are some exceptions of course (eg Pruneyard v. Robins), but they're more like exceptions that prove the rule.