It's just racism
The 14th Amendment illuminates our nation (and those who would tear it down, too)
On Wednesday, two people climbed to the very top of the Empire State Building, like they were George Willig or something. They were later identified to be Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus, stars of Netflix’s 2024 documentary, “Skywalkers: A Love Story.”
They were arrested upon coming down, of course, but while at the tippy top, above the actual structure and straddling the antenna — at least I think it’s an antenna — two things occurred.
One, Beerkus, who is Russian, proposed to Nikolau, who is also Russian.
Two, they unfurled a banner that said this:
“WHEN THE POWER OF LOVE BEATS THE LOVE OF POWER, THE WORLD KNOWS PEACE.”
So subversive.
How dare they.
Here’s what I thought when I read about it.
I thought of P.J. O’Rourke, once editor of The National Lampoon, later the darling of libertarian conservatism in the 80s and 90s, writing for Rolling Stone and several books of his own, of which “Parliament of Whores” I heartily recommend. And though I can’t find the precise quote I heard O’Rourke speak, I know I heard it and it made great sense then and now.
I’ll paraphrase:
The people willing to swim to America, build a raft to get here, or otherwise risk everything for the chance to become Americans, are exactly the kind of people America ought to want.
No, not all willing to do that are in position to do it legally.
Even in the midst of a most liberal American government, Democrats running everything as Republicans run everything now, not everybody could get a visa, nor receive asylum. But if they have the ingenuity, the wherewithal, passion and chutzpah to get here anyway, well, we should want them to be Americans.
Or at least their kids to be.
Beerkus and Nicolau?
They might be here legally. I have no idea.
What I know is, if they’re willing and able to scale the Empire State Building with their bare hands just to offer a message of hope and peace and love? Yeah, that’s who we should want to be Americans. And if, by chance, that’s not available to them, for goodness sake, if they can get back into this country when their kids are born, let it be for them.
Why do you think it’s in the Constitution in the first place?
Good chance, nobody would call these two Russians birthright tourists, nor accuse them of climbing a skyscraper to game the system. Instead, that fury is reserved for black and brown parents who do not look like Beerkus or Nicolau, but who would willingly go to similar lengths to give themselves and their children a real shot in this glorious nation.
Yet, there are those, even on our Facebook timelines, who will tell you, oh, yes, it is about a thriving industry called birthright tourism (of which they can produce no evidence). And, oh, yes, baby factories are real things (though there’s no evidence of that either).
What it is, is fear of the other, who does not look like they do, a fear they’ve never felt from the offspring of the throngs who came before them, from Ireland, Italy and other European ports, and a fear they may have once felt but since forgotten of Cuban and Vietnamese Americans. But Fox News and it’s loonier impersonators were not around following the Bay of Pigs, nor the Mariel Boatlift, and a swath of Americans, encouraged by demagogues, feel it now.
About all of that, on Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, on the matter of the 14th Amendment, the Constitution to still be constitutional, preserving birthright citizenship. And because you may not have read the text of Section I of the 14th Amendment, here it is:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
What the Trump administration tried to do was drive a truck through “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” as though non-citizens on U.S. soil, because they’re non-citizens, are somehow not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which of course they are, just ask Sir Paul McCartney, who was busted for possessing marijuana in Los Angeles in 1975.
Charges were later dismissed but not because, as a Brit, Sir Paul was not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Rather, because who wants to prosecute a Beatle in town to record new music? Nobody, that’s who.
I digress.
Right-wing nitwit anger-fueled commentator Megyn Kelly called conservative SCOTUS justices who sided with the court’s three liberals — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson — “squish conservatives” and Justice Amy Coney Barrett a “turncoat,” as though she and Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, are not there to interpret the Constitution, or even just read it, but to make her happy instead.
Kelly also said, “… anybody from China can come over here, have a baby and that baby will be an American, no matter what. They can leave the day after the child is born, the minute after the child is born,” as though that’s ever happened once.
Vice President J.D. Vance called the decision “an absurdity” as though the 14th Amendment did not exist in the first place and does not say what it specifically says.
Ben Shapiro, who sounds like a guy you’d never trust but who many Americans do, tweeted, “… it’s just more evidence that Congress and multiple presidents, in abdicating their duty on immigration for decades, have screwed America irredeemably,” apparently because we’re totally not the richest nation on earth, haven’t won two world wars, were never a superpower and have never been looked upon as a world leader.
What else is there to think?
Glenn Beck, who still has an audience, said “Citizenship is apparently a suicide pact,” as though the 14th Amendment’s been holding us back as a nation ever since its 1868 passage.
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his dissent — justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas each wrote one, too — “Careful analysis of the text of the Fourteenth Amendment and the process that led to its adoption shows that it does not degrade the concept of United States citizenship in this way.”
That it does not “degrade.”
Really?
Are you $#@%#@% kidding me?
Some of us have major league citizenship and others have short-season rookie ball citizenship?
Degraded citizenship?
It is what it’s been.
It’s just racism.