As a White person with an ancestry in the United States that goes back before the country existed, I’ve spent most of my life assuming the truth of American Exceptionalism.
Don’t get me wrong – I’ve been critical of my country most of my life – but there was still this belief in some of our principles and maybe even the Constitution that let me think “we’re different” and “we’ll get around to fixing that.”
One of the things that kept that belief intact was birthright citizenship.
I recall learning at some point that people who were born in Germany to parents who had come from other places to work there were not German citizens and I was appalled. I had always assumed that birthright citizenship was a given everywhere, but instead it appeared it was an exception.
As in exceptional. As in one of the things that makes the United States exceptional.
The grifter – who is back in the White House because no one with the authority chose to enforce another provision of the 14th Amendment that bars insurrectionists from office – wants to take away one of the key elements of American Exceptionalism.
He doesn’t want the country to be exceptional. He just wants to do his performative powerful rich man routine and see how many people he can hurt in the process.
Of the many things that man and his minions – or maybe his handlers, given the financial power of the broligarchs – are doing to destroy our country, this might not be the worst. Even the current Supreme Court might rule it violates the Constitution. It’s certainly not the one that will affect me personally, given my ancestry.
(The only people who have the right to tell me I don’t belong here are those whose ancestors were here before the Europeans invaded, and that certainly doesn’t include people like the grifter.)
But it’s the one that stabs me in the heart. There’s just something about the principle that if you’re born someplace, you belong there.
I mean, where else can you really belong but the place you were born? Continue reading “Birthright”…