No birthright citizenship=>No US Constitution; =>Attack on 1851 Ohio Constitution

If “birthright” citizenship is overturned, then no one is a citizen of the United States.

This week, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and other presidential candidates seem to be using xenophobia to seek votes by promising to overturn the 14th Amendment.

This “birthright” issue and attacks on the 14th Amendment are marketed as a defense of our border with Mexico, but they also invalidate citizenship for every person born in the United States, meaning that there will be no U.S. Constition, no US social contract, and nothing to protect you, your family and neighbors.

E pluribus unum is being trampled. What affects migrants from Latin America also affects migrants from Europe, Asia and Africa. If that does not include you, it includes your ancestors, even the ones who walked across the Bering Strait.

We live in an age when legalized slavery is returning. It is a feature in the Islamic State and it is a feature in Boko Haram.

To return legalized slavery to the United States, a crucial step is to overturn the 14th Amendment. Ending the 14th Amendment accomplishes opens many opportunities:

• People with African ancestry, something determinable with DNA where skin color is insufficient evidence, can be denied citizenship.
• States will have the power to confiscate property of individuals or classes of people. Many benefitted from the Japanese internment during World War II.  Germans were also suspect people. This time, we will be able to confiscate the property of people from Eastern Europe on suspicion of supporting Putin, from West Asia and the northern half of Africa  on suspicion of supporting Islamic State, from East Asia on suspicion of supporting China or North Korea, from South America on suspicion of supporting Venezuela, from England on suspicion of supporting a royalist faction to bring Prince Harry to the throne of the United States and Canada, etc.
• Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment, a section addressing “the validity of the public debt of the United States,” may have some influence on the borrowing power of the United States. This may affect our international trade. It may also affect Social Security and the pensions of federal workers. It may affect the salary, health care and retirement plans for our soldiers and their families.
• Section 3 of the Fourth Amendment addresses the required loyalty of members of Congress and “insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”

The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution compels us “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Reversing the 14th Amendment is a violation of this primary Constitutional directive.

When I was sworn in as Governor of the Buckeye Girls State, an American Legion Auxiliary civic education program, I took an oath of office in front of Ohio Governor James Rhodes and more than a thousand of my peers who voted for me that “I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of Ohio.” There is no expiration on that promise.

So, the 1851 Ohio Constitution is a social contract binding “we the people of the State of Ohio” and  our “Government is instituted for their equal protection and benefit.”

In my opinion, this week’s challenges to the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution are a threat to the State of Ohio and that approaches a threshold in Article III, Section III, of the United States Constitution in which treason is defined.

World War II veterans taught me in high school that citizens must diligently guard and defend the Constitution of the United States. I wonder if the 14th Amendment is being taught in this way to our students in the regulated curricula rolling across our nation.

The U.S. Constitution obligates me to speak out when I see actions that threaten one of the United States.

Today, I fulfill this obligation.

Sharing a dry cup of water with some Dine families: “The Navajo Water Lady” on CBS Sunday Morning

Regarding The Water Lady: a Savior among the Navajo on CBS This Morning, August 8, 2015.

Historian Claire C. Robertson taught many of us the importance of Sharing the Same Bowl in 1984 when she published the results of her study of women and the history of socioeconomic structures in Accra, Ghana. I learned the significance of eating from a shared plate during a too brief homestay with a very kind family in Dakar, Senegal. Those daily meals changed my sense of what it means to be in a community and how a social contract is incomplete until all in the community are liberated from anarchy.

In this presidential campaign season, the anarchists are speaking loudly about states’ rights and about gun rights and about small-government as if we are all living on the frontier with Pecos Bill.  This anarchy may lead to fascism and many of us know this.

What too many are forgetting is the fascism of Mussolini with its patria potestas and anti-union sentiments.  While fantasies of a neo-Pecos Bill Mussolini ride across the range of the blogosphere, I hope the anarchists take time to read Robert. C. Davis’ Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800. There is a direct correlation between the increase in the size of the US government and the increase in white Americans’ safety in the Ottoman Empire where they, like    James Leander Cathcart, were often captured and sold into slavery. Anarchy and small US government were dangerous for white Americans.

This same kind of small-government anarchy results in too little money being spent on water infrastructure in the United States.

CBS This Morning showed the world that inside the United States there are people who benefit less from U.S. water technology than the millions of people who have been helped by U.S. government assistance overseas. CBS also included a story about the heatwave in several states near the Dine/Navajo nation. For many of the Dine people, their water cups are dry for about half of the month. California Governor Jerry Brown’s directives about water conservation and Mother Nature’s wildfires are warning us that millions of Americans are at risk of sharing a dry cup of water with the Dine.

Rather than take my word for it, you can read more at the Community Water Center.

I’m not sure what kind of callousness allows us tolerate dry cups of water for the Dine. Small-government anarchists in California and other states may change their minds as their water sources go dry.

Unless we apologize, empathize and finance massive water infrastructure development soon, we may learn that we can’t follow Pecos Bill Mussolini to another frontier in an undiscovered verdant valley. Rather, we should direct our national and state governments to invest on our behalf in a long drink of water at the Empathy Saloon inside the space of the American social contract.