THREE CHEERS FOR ARIZONA: DIANA WEST
This week’s syndicated column:
Three cheers aren’t enough for Arizona. It’s the first state to defend American citizenship on the basis of identity, and American sovereignty on the basis of borders. In an age of blurred identities and undefended borders, Arizona has put itself in a good, old-fashioned state of revolt against the postmodern, global-minded state of being foisted on us by internationalist elites up to and including President Barack Hussein Obama.
That’s the effect, anyway, of Arizona’s new immigration law, which, as George F. Will has aptly pointed out, “makes what is already a federal offense — being in the country illegally — a state offense.” Only in our time, with identities blurred, borders undefended and elites internationalized, could this be controversial. Among other things, the new law requires state law enforcement to verify a person’s immigration status in the course of “lawful contact.”
Far from heralding the deployment of jackbooted terror squads among the tumbleweed and sprinklers, Arizona’s new law acknowledges that American citizenship does and (wow) should exist, and affirms that sovereignty, ignored at the federal level, is the responsibility of a state overrun by illegal aliens mainly from neighboring Mexico.
Given our psycho idea of “normal” — alien-strained schools, bankrupted hospitals, advancing bilingualism and “sanctuary cities” — this new immigration law has aroused Establishment wrath. Moving across the spectrum from Right(ish) to Left, this ranges from the tense chorus of tut-tutting from the pro-amnesty Republican underbelly (Jeb Bush, Karl Rove, Tom Ridge), insta-calls for boycotts of Arizona from California officials, denunciations from Left-wing national pols and pundits (Nancy Pelosi, E.J. Dionne) a possible Justice Department investigation from President Obama, and, of course, much razzing from La Raza and other Che-idolizing open-borders and Reconquista agitators.
There’s another reason. Arizona suddenly poses an unexpected threat to the status quo of permissible lawlessness, the illegal demographic transformation of this country into a linguistic and cultural extension of Latin America. This out-of-control movement has been tolerated if not facilitated by our political leadership for several decades under the dangerous influence of what we know as multiculturalism, the school of thought that has widely delegitimized U.S. identity altogether. Maybe more than anything else, Arizona’s law restores a civic sense that there exists such an identity, and it is, and should be, legally protected. Thus, the multiculti rage.
A second bill pending in Arizona concerns another legal aspect of American identity, namely the constitutional requirement that our presidents be “natural-born” and not “naturalized” Americans. Both laws may be seen as state-level attempts to safeguard the nation according to principles set forth in the Constitution because authorities have failed to act responsibly at the federal level.
The “natural born” bill would require presidential candidates running in Arizona to submit proof of their constitutional eligibility to the Arizona secretary of state. In the case of President Obama, one such proof would be his long-form, circa 1961, birth certificate. This original form includes, for example, the name of the hospital where a person was born, as well as that of the attending physician — information not included in the computer-generated short form that has appeared online and is of recent vintage.
Just as the state’s new check on immigration status seems appropriate, so, too, does this potential requirement that presidential candidates prove their “natural born” bona fides, a requirement that, according to World Net Daily, is also under consideration in state legislatures in Georgia, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina and in the U.S. Congress.
I’ve never understood the derisive wrath targeting Americans troubled by Obama’s refusal, for reasons unknown, to release his long-form birth certificate and end the divisive natural-born controversy — partly, of course, because I am one such American. Another so troubled is Army Lt. Col. Terry Lakin, who, taking seriously his oath to preserve and protect the Constitution, has laid it all on the line: Lakin has stopped obeying military orders, including deployment orders to Afghanistan for his second tour, pending release of the president’s original birth document proving his constitutional eligibility to be commander in chief. Unconscionably, the president prefers to see Lakin court-martialed rather than show his old paperwork. Why?
Unanswered, the question consigns us to that limbo of uncertainty — of blurred identities, undefended borders and internationalized elites. But identity matters. The law matters. And the Constitution matters above all.
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