The Two Fourteenth Amendments

Two people want to change or abolish the fourteenth amendment. You have the "birthers" or conservatives from the right who want to strip out the words that say "anyone born on US soil is an American citizen". Some argue that this provision should be stricken out in favor of a line that says "Your parents have to be American citizens". What's wrong with this is how does Anybody prove that they are a United States citizen? So you take the citizenship test that new immigrents have to take? If so there are a lot of older people who would not pass it, because they have been out of school a long time. No court has ever rules that children of aliens born here are NOT protected. On the contrary you have an 1998 case involving Chinese laborers who were decreed to have citizenship if they were born on US soil. So that issue is settled. Nobody is ever going to get through a provision to strike out lines in the fourteenth amendment past three fourths of the state legeslatures. This is just another phantom issue the right wingers like to flap their gums about. On the other hand there are people on the left, and I would be one of these, who want to insert the words "Natural born" in front of "persons" in the provision that says everybody has equal protection under the law. As you know this provision has recently been deemed to apply to corporations. Here is a case where we can indeed say "This is not the writers of the amendment meant" because corporations were not even granted "person hood" till a 1886 court ruling, that has been affirmed many times since. Thom Hartman says we could compromise and have BOTH provisions inserted into the constitution. Of the two the corporations so beloved by the right wing would suffer the most. Because illegal aliens would go ahead and apply for citizenship the legal way, whereas corporations would forever be stripped of their person hood. I imagine these two issues will be major issues in the fall campaign.

Justice Elena Kagan has officially been sworn in. She was officially approved by the Senate yesterday in a vote where five Republicans went for her and one Democrat went against her. Otherwise it was a party line vote. Still the Republicans were willing to put in this possibly gay Justice and definite lover of gay rights. Some people say that justices ruling on gay rights issues should recuse themselves if they are themselves gay. I do not agree with this position. There is nothing about having homosexual proclivities that prevents you from making an unbiased decision on homosexual rights. Justice Walker out in California is himself gay. This decision he wrote is 138 pages and gay protagonists suggest that you read it. In the decision he enumerates eighty "findings of legal fact" and these "findings of fact" cannot be touched by a higher court. That's what they say. The ruling makes clear that there are "no new rights" being granted but only the right to marry, which always existed and that sexual bias needn't enter. He further said that "separate but equal" wouldn't cut it. This means that "domestic partnerships" grant inherently inferior rights to actual marriage. He said that it is "Not in the interest of the state to define the sexual choice of who you marry, nor is it in the state's interest to discourage homosexuality. These are the facts. I'm just reporting them. As to Justice Kennedy voting to overturn this decision when it gets to the Supreme Court, the signs do not augur well for that outcome. Because Justice Kennedy wrote the decision on Lawerence verses Texas in that sodomy case a few years ago, striking down Texas sodomy laws. So we're already half way there. In the case of "Loving verses Virginia" in 1967 you will remember the scene in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" where Spencer Tracy says to his prospective son in law "In at least a half a dozen states you'd be breaking the law". And the parents went on to discuss all the other problems they'd have with societal acceptance. As you know there is one line where Sydney Porterier says to his father "Until the weight of your generation is off our backs, we will never be free". The father says "You owe me everything" and the son says "No, you owe ME everything just as I will owe my son everything if I have one, and his son in turn". This line has become sort of a hippy creedo. You know- - - all of the foregoing is well and good, but it's irrelivent. You remember in "Inheret the Wind" where Clarence Darrow is refused the right by the judge to call scientists, palientologists and anthropoligists, in order to make a case through these witnesses. They were ruled as irrelivent by Henry Morgan. "They do not pertain to the crime at hand", which pretty much boils down "Did or didn't he go it?" So they called a lot of witnesses including sociologists and the whole nine yards. They make a nice case- - but not for the issue at hand. At no time in history so far as I know, not even in corrupt Greece and Rome, was homosexual marriage a recognized institution. Indeed the moray was that you'd have sex with a teenage boy and then break it off when he got married. Can't we at least come up to the morality of ancient Greece? Later today they are ruling on whether the flood gates to the marriage altar will be reopened or not. If marriage is again allowed, there will be a massive wave of celebrations.

President Obama has desperately truing to talk this economy up, like he was yesterday campaigning for the guy in Illinois. But the economy in the words of some "still hasn't accelerated sufficiently to break the sound barrier". Unemployment stayed frozen at 9.5% and there was a new loss of jobs by the figure of 131,000. This can't be good. I guess part of the problem is we're not "thinking out of the box". That term so far as I know originated with that test they do on IQ tests of drawing nine dots arranged in rows of three and you're told "Pass a straight line through all nine dots using just four strokes" or whatever. In order to do it you have to "go out of the box". On one Star Trek problem, there was this space ship that was undergoing orbital decay and in danger of crashing and Q, this God-like character who had temporarily lost his powers said "Oh that problem is simple. Just change the gravitational constant." So they used their warp drive to "lighten the other ship". In the case of the economy I guess in order to think out of the box, it's at least necessary to conceptualize WHAT being "out of the box" would be like. For instance with high blood pressure there are ways of going about the problem. You can use an ACE inhibitor to alter the pottassium and sodium ballance - - to affect how chemical reactions occur in the body. Or you can alter the heart rate. Or you can clear out the arteries clogged with cholesterol and plaque that block the blood flow. OR - - you can reduce the supply of Blood. That's where leeches come in. (We won't say any more about that) Well, in the case of unemployment we can do some "original thinking" like they did in the 'thirties by "reducing the number of workers". In the 'thirties this was done by shortening the work hours to forty hours per week. In the case of today, we can't grow jobs fast enough. So why don't we lower the retirement age to fifty-five? This would reduce the number of workers. You could argue that till age 55 you work for the money. After age 55 you now have earned the right, so the thinking goes, to work at any job you WANT and you do the job because you LIKE it and not because of what you'll get paid. It would bring about an interesting transformation should it be instituted. At the same time we could lower medi-care to age 55. Hartman argues that since unemployment would drop and wages for those working would go up, that tax revenues would not suffer all that much. If so we could merely remove the FICA ceiling for those making over a hundred thousand. This seems like the simplest solution to me. What it would do is remove the anxiety of a lot of older people wondering if they were still up to their jobs and will they get fired a year or two before they start drawing social security.

One thing that Malcolm X noted on his famous pilgrimage to Mecca in March of 1964 was that all races were there in a broad mixture all over the world- - from Moracco to Indonesia- - worshiping and going through the ceremonies there at Mecca. I doubt that Islam has the same prohibition against inter racial dating that O R U or Bob Jones University has. It was this trip that totally turned Malcolm X around on the race issue, and from then on he taught that all races should live together in harmony. Of course Islam teaches charity to the poor. This is another of the five pillars of the faith. And Moslems are big believers in hospitality to your guests and being a good host. Of course there are many ways in which Islam is more appealing than Christianity. How much time has been expended debating the "nature of Christ" or the mysteries of the incarnation or trans-substantiation or various baptismal trinitarian formulas or the Nicene Creed and all of that. For Islam it's really simple. You just proclaim "There is no god but Allah and Mohamed is his Prophet". Of course Allah just means "God" and so there is no big mystery there. I imaging like AA teaches it would be "God as you understand him" and not Neil Savedras "God of the theologians check list". The wonderful thing is there is no original sin in Islam. So there is no doctrine of blood atonement. (blood feuds between warring tribes is another matter) I'm talking about the shedding of blood in a sacrificial manner to atone for sin. Islam is more tollerant than Christianity. Moslems regard Jesus as a prophet, but Christians do not show Mohamed the same courtesy. Islam reveres many figures in the Bible. Another pillar of course is praying five times a day to Mecca. The one remaining one was fasting during the month of Romadon, which rotates throughout the year. And there are a few absolute injunctions like "Don't eat pork and don't consume alcohol". I'm not saying we should all become Moslems, but we should at least understand this faith if we are going to loath and despise this faith so vociferously. I think if we understand these people better we can come to an accord. Dr. Levy says that one percent of Moslems are extremist terrorist oriented. That number concerns him because it still ammounts to ten million. But these days the percentage of Christians that believe in a literal fulfillment of the book of Revelations has probably gone way up. When was younger it may have been less than thirty percent. I bet right now it's over fifty the way Christianity has swung to the right. Chuck Smith teaches this war fantasy where on the other hand he'll be safe in heaven from its dangers. We tend to think Heaven will be a big change for our lives. But for people like Chuck it's just doing business on the other side of the street. He still expects to be an adulated figure with his desciples and children and grand children all around him. Basically for him he expects little to have changed. If to condone something is as bad as actually doing it, one wonders under this standard what ghastly attrocities Hal Lindsey and Chuck Smith will be guilty of as they cheer from the peanut gallary getting some of vicarious thrill.