Ann Coulter’s Opinion Inconsistent
November 7, 2018 at 5:06 p.m.
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Ann Coulter's column in the Nov. 2 Times-Union is headlined "The True History of Birthright Citizenship." In it, she points out (correctly) that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in the wake of the Civil War, was intended to provide citizenship status to people who had been forcibly "imported" from Africa by U.S. citizens, including the Founding Fathers. And this included the descendants of these slaves, hence "birthright citizenship." I suppose that, because slavery was entirely legal prior to the Civil War, one could claim that these African-Americans were not illegal immigrants; instead, they were brought into the country entirely legally. (This is small comfort, to say the least.)
In her column, Ms. Coulter makes it clear that she wishes to interpret the 14th Amendment narrowly, within its historical context: It didn't foresee a time when immigrants would come to the U.S. under other circumstances and does not therefore automatically grant future persons, coming under other circumstances and with different motivation, the same rights. I agree that historical context must always be taken into account, because none of us can see the future (and our founders certainly could not, either). Times change, situations change and context is important. There are parts of our Constitution that are time-bound or dated and probably should be changed to meet new circumstances.
What disturbs me about Ms. Coulter's reasoning is that it's inconsistent: she wishes to apply historical context to the 14th Amendment but not to the 2nd Amendment, which had its own historical context, 90 years or so earlier than the 14th Amendment. Text linguistics is providing new ways of research into language usage, based on the time when a document was written. This is only possible in our era because of "big data"— the digitizing of hundreds of thousands of words from documents of the time. The initial results of several forays into looking into what the words "the right to keep and bear arms" meant at the time of the writing of the Constitution indicates that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the phrase is used in a military context. The results may not yet be conclusive. The Second Amendment reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." It is the only amendment to the Constitution that includes a rationale for the stipulated right. What I find interesting is that, due to several recent studies of corpus linguistics (the study of all language and documents from a given era and place), it is clear that the vast majority of uses of "keep and bear arms" (separately or in combination) from the revolutionary era refer exclusively to military contexts. This does not accord with relatively recent (2008, Heller) Supreme Court decisions. More research is needed. For a useful article on the topic, see:
blog.harvardlawreview.org/corpus-linguistics-and-the-second-amendment/
In any case, my point is simply that opening the question of what a document meant in its original setting is worthwhile. But one should be consistent about doing so. Ms. Coulter is not.
Jim Eisenbraun
Warsaw, via email
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Ann Coulter's column in the Nov. 2 Times-Union is headlined "The True History of Birthright Citizenship." In it, she points out (correctly) that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in the wake of the Civil War, was intended to provide citizenship status to people who had been forcibly "imported" from Africa by U.S. citizens, including the Founding Fathers. And this included the descendants of these slaves, hence "birthright citizenship." I suppose that, because slavery was entirely legal prior to the Civil War, one could claim that these African-Americans were not illegal immigrants; instead, they were brought into the country entirely legally. (This is small comfort, to say the least.)
In her column, Ms. Coulter makes it clear that she wishes to interpret the 14th Amendment narrowly, within its historical context: It didn't foresee a time when immigrants would come to the U.S. under other circumstances and does not therefore automatically grant future persons, coming under other circumstances and with different motivation, the same rights. I agree that historical context must always be taken into account, because none of us can see the future (and our founders certainly could not, either). Times change, situations change and context is important. There are parts of our Constitution that are time-bound or dated and probably should be changed to meet new circumstances.
What disturbs me about Ms. Coulter's reasoning is that it's inconsistent: she wishes to apply historical context to the 14th Amendment but not to the 2nd Amendment, which had its own historical context, 90 years or so earlier than the 14th Amendment. Text linguistics is providing new ways of research into language usage, based on the time when a document was written. This is only possible in our era because of "big data"— the digitizing of hundreds of thousands of words from documents of the time. The initial results of several forays into looking into what the words "the right to keep and bear arms" meant at the time of the writing of the Constitution indicates that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the phrase is used in a military context. The results may not yet be conclusive. The Second Amendment reads: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." It is the only amendment to the Constitution that includes a rationale for the stipulated right. What I find interesting is that, due to several recent studies of corpus linguistics (the study of all language and documents from a given era and place), it is clear that the vast majority of uses of "keep and bear arms" (separately or in combination) from the revolutionary era refer exclusively to military contexts. This does not accord with relatively recent (2008, Heller) Supreme Court decisions. More research is needed. For a useful article on the topic, see:
blog.harvardlawreview.org/corpus-linguistics-and-the-second-amendment/
In any case, my point is simply that opening the question of what a document meant in its original setting is worthwhile. But one should be consistent about doing so. Ms. Coulter is not.
Jim Eisenbraun
Warsaw, via email
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