USCCB on Birthright Citizenship

[Odilon]

Yes, that is politics, which is the only role for the Constitutional based American government. They are not in the business of charity, that belongs to the individual Christian.

 

[Odilon]

These people suing have no standing. The leftist lawyer just wants to make a name for himself, and any constitutional respecting Judge should throw this out of court at the earliest opportunity.

 

[TheLittleLady]

As you can see from above, there is one case that was filed 3 days ago. When reading the case, the complaints not simply drempt up out of thin air but are based on prior court rulings.

Perhaps I mis-interpreted the original claim, to me it read as if such suits were filed more than once, a regular occurrence.

Dealing with a nasty virus I am only able to read short documents right now, the eyestrain and muddle head from the fever has put me on the sidelines. Next weekend I will read the entire case back to front and (if the thread is still open!) respond.

 

[PetraG]

The President of the United States is not the ‘average person’ and a speech at a planned-in-advance occasion by him is really not the time to be making things up off the top of his head. Especially when he is trying to use said made-up things to make.his point

It is quite fair to say that for someone in his position and circumstances he was being incredibly ignorant.

And I did:

I don’t think there is any excuse for someone in his position to not know these things, so I agree with you on that. The President should not go on the record as saying we’re the only nation that has it without bothering to find out if that assumption is true!!!

 

[phil19034]

Well, if the plaintiffs in this civil suit have standing to sue and enough of a case to be allowed to commence proceedings then why should they not?

how could they possibly have standing?

 

[LilyM]

Why wouldn’t they, why shouldnt they, if they are affected - harmed in some way - by the actions of the people they are suing? Isn’t that the essence of a civil suit?

 

[Erikaspirit16]

I think it is the other way around. I think there are two sets of “facts” because the two sides have stopped having a rational discussion. (Someone even did a study in which they found that having people watch news outlets that catered to viewers with opposed sentiments made people even more entrenched in their unfavorable views than those who don’t!!)

I agree completely that the two sides have totally different sources of news.

However, a president who thinks NATO is a club where members pay dues (it isn’t) or that climate change isn’t at least partially manmade, or that tariffs are a great idea is someone you can’t debate with.

 

[PetraG]

I agree completely that the two sides have totally different sources of news.

However, a president who thinks NATO is a club where members pay dues (it isn’t) or that climate change isn’t at least partially manmade, or that tariffs are a great idea is someone you can’t debate with.

Let us be totally clear: I am saying that an average citizen with good educational attainment does not have the time and background to know all these things off of the top of their heads. That is no excuse for a President to say such things. It is one thing to not know whether a statement is true off the top of your head and quite another to repeatedly assert something is true in front of a national audience when you either know it is false or do not know for certain that what you are saying is true. This is NOT a subtle difference!!

The President cannot use ignorance as an excuse. If he doesn’t know, he shouldn’t say he knows.

I am continually distressed when partisanship becomes such a matter of trench warfare that deliberate misstatements are defended. I believe that we as Catholics have a responsibility to defend truth-telling and to expect public corrections to be made when false statements are made in a public forum. That is regardless of politics and regardless of whether we are talking about public figures or the media.

When people who ought to be practicing statesmanship with integrity are cynically making baldly-wrong misstatements that are never apologized for, that is a direct attack on democracy.

We are Catholics. We cannot defend an ends-justifies-the-means mentality. It has gotten to the point that it is very clear that the President simply does not care whether the rhetorical points he wants to make are true or not. If he cared, he would stop being so careless. It is as simple as that. As it is, he has doubled-down over and over in favor of telling the American people what he thinks will make him popular instead of telling the truth, and he has done it with an unprecedented frequency and brazenness in its disregard for the truth.

I keep hearing “everyone in politics does it.” No, they don’t. That contention itself is false. It is so demonstrably false in the President’s case that it is intolerable. There is no metric of the dissemination of wrong information by which the President does not far exceed every other elected official in the national politics of the United States in this century. None…and before he came along, oh yes, there were contenders. Not any more. I defy anyone to show me that I’m wrong about that. Everyone in politics does not do what he is doing, no one in politics is as brazen as he is, but if it works for him, we can count on that becoming the actual standard in politics. People in politics will do what works, whether it is moral or not.

Is that what we want? No. We cannot give into despair and give consent to that. It is time to draw the line.

 

[Erikaspirit16]

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a Conservative think tank, published a pretty comprehensive civics test back in 2007. Sixty questions. It only takes about 10 minutes, although I think there are some questions that almost everyone (including me) has to stop and think about. Government, economics, political theory, history. It’s all there. For the record, I got 100%. I wonder what Trump would have gotten?
http://www.isi.org/quiz.aspx?q=A63F6221-8F5A-4E6A-BCC9-953F36B87DCD

In yesterday’s (Nov. 4) Washington Post, “The Fact Checker” summed up where we are: during his presidency, Trump has made 6,420 “false or misleading” claims. His biggest hits include “I passed the biggest tax cut in history” (repeated 120 times!); “the US economy is the best in history” (repeated 74 times); the border wall is in the process of being built (repeated 74 times); and in a recent interview with the Wall St. Journal: “I mean, other than some tariffs on steel–which is actually small, what do we have?..Where do we have tariffs? We don’t have tariffs anywhere.” (The WSJ then published a list of tariffs on $305 Billion worth of goods.)

And then of course we come to Brett Kavanaugh. Trump has claimed 25 times that Brett was #1 in his class at Yale. The only problem is that he wasn’t. Yale doesn’t rank graduates. He did graduate cum laude with his undergraduate degree–but so did almost 50% of the class. And of course there were magna cum laude and summa cum laude graduates, who all did better than Brett.

So it’s not just that he lies or is abysmally ignorant–he repeats wrong information over and over and over. I only know of one other leader who did that. He was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933.

 

[PetraG]

So it’s not just that he lies or is abysmally ignorant–he repeats wrong information over and over and over. I only know of one other leader who did that. He was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933.

Oh, heavens no. Orwell didn’t write 1984 with only that one example in mind.

“It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”
― George Orwell, 1984

If the President could make everyone safe from crime and could secure our borders absolutely and could guarantee everyone a job and services such as health care that could deliver them from all want, and the only price was that the people accept that what was false had to be treated as the truth even though everyone could know it was false, the price would be too high.

Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth!
One without the other becomes a destructive lie.
Pope St. John Paul II, Oct 11, 1998, homily for the canonization of St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-p...98/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_11101998_stein.html

 

[PetraG]

I agree completely that the two sides have totally different sources of news.

This, by the way, makes it far more difficult to discover what the truth is. I am not even saying that news sources lie. Even if there is no outright falsification, I am saying that the choices made about which truths to present, which to leave out (and something always has to be left out, of course) and how to present the story are now made not in an effort to give viewers the best chance of sorting out what they think on their own, but in order to win and keep a market share of a target demographic. Face it: this is the world that journalists live in.

Free news is not free. It is presented in order to deliver a certain kind of viewer to advertisers or those selling news on a more-or-less pay-per-view basis. No matter what outlet we are viewing, we always have to be aware that our biases are being pandered to. We’re being herded towards certain behaviors, consumption habits, and yes, certain opinions, like cattle. That is the price of “free” news. Likewise, those who are hungry to obtain and maintain political power seek to manipulate public opinion in their favor. We have to remain aware of that. Otherwise, we’re going to concede our duty as voters in a free market and in a representative democracy. If we don’t question every source and the agenda of every source and the blind spots of every source, we are going to become mere pawns in a game that is not being waged on behalf of the Gospel.

 

[MikeInVA]

It is quite fair to say that for someone in his position and circumstances he was being incredibly ignorant.

So he was more accurate than precise. Very few developed countries offer birthright citizenship. The point stands that while there are industries focused on exploiting birthright citizenship in the U.S., there probably isn’t a similar industry for Surinam.