The Fourteenth Amendment
Fellow Citizens,
There are propositions so monstrous that they ought not merely be opposed, but exposed — held aloft before the public eye like a warning lantern upon a darkened shore. And among such propositions is this alarming notion: that the birthright of citizenship, secured after rivers of blood and generations of bondage, should again be placed upon the auction block of faction and prejudice.
The Fourteenth Amendment was not some casual ornament hung upon the Constitution. It was a covenant written in the ashes of civil war. It declared, plainly and irrevocably, that those once held as property were men — citizens — and possessors of equal protection under the law. To strike at that amendment is not merely to amend parchment; it is to reopen the grave of slavery itself.
What, I ask, is a republic, if citizenship may be granted or revoked according to the passions of the powerful? If the rights of one class of men rest not upon nature and justice, but upon the temporary humor of politicians, then no man’s liberty is secure. The chain fastened first upon the Black man may, in time, be fastened upon any man. Tyranny never travels alone. It enters by exception and remains by habit.
Mr. Ledbetter’s wish that the Supreme Court overturn the Fourteenth Amendment reveals a principle more dangerous than the statement itself: the belief that citizenship is not an inherent civil condition, but a privilege to be rationed by those who imagine themselves superior custodians of the nation. Such reasoning is the ancient language of aristocracy, merely dressed in republican clothing.
The defenders of such ideas often speak in the name of “tradition,” yet forget the greatest American tradition of all — the continual enlargement of liberty. This nation did not ascend by narrowing the definition of humanity, but by widening it. Every righteous step in our history has moved toward inclusion under the law, not exclusion from it.
Let us speak honestly. The Fourteenth Amendment was born because the nation understood a terrible truth: that freedom without citizenship is but a shadow. The slave emancipated yet denied equal standing remained vulnerable to every cruelty of local power, every mob, every legislature poisoned by racial hatred. Citizenship was made constitutional because justice demanded permanence where prejudice demanded reversal.
And what would follow should such doctrines prevail? Endless uncertainty. A republic divided into castes. Millions taught that their rights exist not by principle, but by permission. No nation can long survive such moral treachery against its own foundations.
There are men who imagine they defend America by reducing her promises. They do not defend the republic — they diminish it. The strength of a free nation lies not in ancestry, nor color, nor inherited station, but in equal law applied without fear or favoritism.
The blood shed in the Civil War settled this question at a price too dreadful to repeat. To overturn the citizenship of former slaves — or to weaken the constitutional principle born from their liberation — would be to declare that sacrifice meaningless and justice temporary.
A constitution that protects only the favored is not a constitution, but a conspiracy.
Therefore let every citizen who values liberty reject such dangerous folly. For the moment a government may decide who is fully human before the law, the republic has already begun to decay.
Rights are either universal, or they are merely privileges waiting to be withdrawn.
A Citizen of the Republic,
The Real Thom Paine