SPLC Report Examines Extremist Views of Lawmakers Attacking 14th Amendment
Southern Poverty Law Center
The coalition of state lawmakers seeking to undermine the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship protection includes a dozen legislators who embrace a raft of radical beliefs, including conspiracy theories about supposed government concentration camps and claims that President Obama is a foreigner.
Attacking the "Constitution: State Legislators for Legal Immigration & the Anti-Immigrant Movement" profiles 12 leading members of State Legislators for Legal Immigration (SLLI), which has announced a national campaign to end the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship for all children born in the United States. The group is also pushing a number of other harsh, anti-immigrant proposals in states across the country.
"The radical beliefs of SLLI members parallel their radical agenda – rewriting the 14th Amendment," said Heidi Beirich, research director for the SPLC and author of the report. "The fact that we're talking about people who wield real political power should scare everyone who cares about our constitutional ideals."
SLLI, which has about 65 members in 40 states, was founded by Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe in 2007. The group works closely with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which the SPLC has designated as an anti-immigrant hate group because of its white nationalist agenda and ties to racist groups.
Metcalfe has said that immigrant parents "live the life of a criminal" and should have their children taken away. He has routinely demonized undocumented immigrants as criminals, despite studies that clearly show immigrants are on average much less criminal than native-born Americans.
Metcalfe once denounced Pennsylvania's Domestic Violence Awareness Month as part of the "homosexual agenda" because it included men as possible victims of domestic violence. He characterized military veterans concerned about climate change and foreign energy dependence as traitors promoting a "leftist agenda." And, like others in the so-called "birther movement," Metcalfe has cast doubt on Obama's U.S. citizenship.
Along with Metcalfe, the report profiles Rep. Tim Bearden, Georgia; Rep. Leo Berman, Texas; Rep. Judy Burges, Arizona; Rep. Sally Kern, Oklahoma; Rep. Charles Key, Oklahoma; Sen. Brian Nieves, Missouri; Sen. Russell Pearce, Arizona; Rep. Michael Pitts, South Carolina; Rep. Matt Shea, Washington; Rep. Randy Terrill, Oklahoma; and Sen. Danny Verdin, South Carolina. It includes these details:
•Charles Key, an Oklahoma legislator, has claimed the federal government had advance knowledge of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and engaged in a "cover-up." He managed to get a grand jury convened in 1999 to investigate the allegation, only to denounce the grand jury when it found nothing to support his theory.
•Matt Shea, a Washington legislator, appeared on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' radio show and expressed concerns about supposed concentration camps operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
•Sally Kern, an Oklahoma legislator, told a newspaper that she opposed high-resolution driver's license photos because she believed they were a sign of the end times. She apparently feared a coming one-world government could use the photos.
•Danny Verdin, a South Carolina state senator, has compared the fight against undocumented immigrants to the Confederacy's struggle against the Union. In 2000, he was one of the main speakers at the "Heritage Celebration" held in Columbia, S.C., to defend the Confederate battle flag. He reportedly helped to organize the rally, and he shared the podium with several neo-Confederate and white supremacist leaders.
"Not all members of this coalition have voiced such radical opinions, but by virtue of pursuing this attack on the 14th Amendment, they all have signed on to an attempt to radically reinterpret the Constitution – an attempt that one conservative commentator accurately described as a fool's errand," Beirich said.
SLLI contends that the 14th Amendment has been misapplied to grant automatic U.S. citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants. But it is clear from the record of debate in Congress leading up to the amendment's adoption in 1868 that its sponsors did intend for the amendment to cover the children of non-citizens, including Gypsies, perhaps the group most analogous to today's undocumented immigrants, as well as Chinese immigrants, who retained citizenship in their home countries, were present in large numbers and were barred from naturalization.
Link to the Original Report and More Resources
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Showing posts with label Citizenship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Citizenship. Show all posts
Michael Thorn: Television Discourse and Governmentality: Considering Da Vinci's Inquest and Da Vinci's City Hall as Citizen Projects
Television Discourse and Governmentality: Considering Da Vinci's Inquest and Da Vinci's City Hall as Citizen Projects
by Michael Thorn
Cineaction #82/83 (Hosted on Free Library)
...
This analysis will use a Foucauldian governmental approach that borrows from political economy. A governmental approach is a context-specific approach that analyzes cultural institutions, products, and discourses in terms of tactics and strategies of influence and control where power and knowledge work together to regulate, manage, problematize, and maintain and/or change behaviour and thought. (3) This approach assumes that "discourses structure action, belief and conduct" (4) and it has been applied to both film and television. (5) It also assumes that discourses compete with each other as "wills to knowledge" and "wills to power" in what Foucault calls "truth games." (6) Understood in this way, discourse is both more and less than ideological. That is, this approach understands that tactics and strategies can be resisted, rejected, and contested both by those addressed and by others seeking to address the same audience. As Foucault says, "[t]he power relationship and freedom's refusal to submit cannot ... be separated." (7) However, this approach also understands that the types and forms of knowledge and power used to underlie the "truth" of any particular discourse will still have an impact on that text's ability to maintain, control, or change thought. A governmental analysis of discourse in film, television, and new media, then, is not so much concerned with how the spectator is hailed to accept as true, uncritically, a certain ideology, or, alternatively, how a certain discourse can be deconstructed to reveal its inherent contradictions, or even how a multiplicity of spectator positions can frame a text in different ways; rather, this approach is concerned with the methods, practices, and knowledges used to try to persuade spectators to accept as valid particular perspectives--perspectives seeking to maintain, control, or change enough thought about an issue or problem so as to have an impact on that problem. As such, this approach should also work to uncover the political, economic, and institutional influences reinforcing these discursive tactics and strategies. This is why the discipline of political economy is perfectly suited to dovetail with a governmental analysis. According to Vincent Mosco, political economy is the study of "the social relations, particularly the power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources." (8) How discourses, especially media discourses, are constituted politically and economically prior to and during distribution and consumption have definite effects on their governmental influence. For Mosco, the key entry point for political economy is the process of commodification, but this process must also be understood in relation to processes of spatialization and structuration. (9) While this paper does refer to the profit-driven commercialization of Canadian television, a process of commodification, and also to the relationship between the regional politics of Vancouver and the national politics of Canada, a spaclalized relationship, the political economic emphasis in this paper will be on how the discourse of the Da Vinci series participates in structuring and promoting certain kinds of social relations, particularly power relations; in this case, as they pertain to the relationship between certain governmental institutions (the police and coroner's office) and certain vulnerable populations in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (drug users and sex-trade workers). Of course, for Foucault, technologies of power intersect with technologies of production, technologies of sign systems, and technologies of the self. (10) As such, the Foucauldian emphasis here will be on how the narrative sign system of the show is constituted with the power to influence and change thought and action (or the self) on the issue of harm-reduction through productive influences. In other words, this paper will use as its entry point that intersection where the show's explicit textual meaning meets both its socio-political context and (some of) the creative elements of its production. 1 am using this as my entry point to highlight the show's obvious political agenda, which seems to operate above and beyond any desire of the show's producers to generate profit.
To Read the Entire Essay
by Michael Thorn
Cineaction #82/83 (Hosted on Free Library)
...
This analysis will use a Foucauldian governmental approach that borrows from political economy. A governmental approach is a context-specific approach that analyzes cultural institutions, products, and discourses in terms of tactics and strategies of influence and control where power and knowledge work together to regulate, manage, problematize, and maintain and/or change behaviour and thought. (3) This approach assumes that "discourses structure action, belief and conduct" (4) and it has been applied to both film and television. (5) It also assumes that discourses compete with each other as "wills to knowledge" and "wills to power" in what Foucault calls "truth games." (6) Understood in this way, discourse is both more and less than ideological. That is, this approach understands that tactics and strategies can be resisted, rejected, and contested both by those addressed and by others seeking to address the same audience. As Foucault says, "[t]he power relationship and freedom's refusal to submit cannot ... be separated." (7) However, this approach also understands that the types and forms of knowledge and power used to underlie the "truth" of any particular discourse will still have an impact on that text's ability to maintain, control, or change thought. A governmental analysis of discourse in film, television, and new media, then, is not so much concerned with how the spectator is hailed to accept as true, uncritically, a certain ideology, or, alternatively, how a certain discourse can be deconstructed to reveal its inherent contradictions, or even how a multiplicity of spectator positions can frame a text in different ways; rather, this approach is concerned with the methods, practices, and knowledges used to try to persuade spectators to accept as valid particular perspectives--perspectives seeking to maintain, control, or change enough thought about an issue or problem so as to have an impact on that problem. As such, this approach should also work to uncover the political, economic, and institutional influences reinforcing these discursive tactics and strategies. This is why the discipline of political economy is perfectly suited to dovetail with a governmental analysis. According to Vincent Mosco, political economy is the study of "the social relations, particularly the power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources." (8) How discourses, especially media discourses, are constituted politically and economically prior to and during distribution and consumption have definite effects on their governmental influence. For Mosco, the key entry point for political economy is the process of commodification, but this process must also be understood in relation to processes of spatialization and structuration. (9) While this paper does refer to the profit-driven commercialization of Canadian television, a process of commodification, and also to the relationship between the regional politics of Vancouver and the national politics of Canada, a spaclalized relationship, the political economic emphasis in this paper will be on how the discourse of the Da Vinci series participates in structuring and promoting certain kinds of social relations, particularly power relations; in this case, as they pertain to the relationship between certain governmental institutions (the police and coroner's office) and certain vulnerable populations in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (drug users and sex-trade workers). Of course, for Foucault, technologies of power intersect with technologies of production, technologies of sign systems, and technologies of the self. (10) As such, the Foucauldian emphasis here will be on how the narrative sign system of the show is constituted with the power to influence and change thought and action (or the self) on the issue of harm-reduction through productive influences. In other words, this paper will use as its entry point that intersection where the show's explicit textual meaning meets both its socio-political context and (some of) the creative elements of its production. 1 am using this as my entry point to highlight the show's obvious political agenda, which seems to operate above and beyond any desire of the show's producers to generate profit.
To Read the Entire Essay
Labels:
Canada,
Citizenship,
Discourse,
Government,
Institutions,
Knowledge,
Michael Thorn,
Michel Foucault,
Political Economy,
Power,
Truth,
TV
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