(This was written yesterday but the internet didn't work well.)

I think today's a good day to talk about rights. I've been thinking a lot about what rights are because so many people have different ideas of who has what rights. Civil rights, human rights, constitutional rights, etc. are all things we talk about but the terms tend to be taken for granted while people don't neccessarily agree on what they mean. The anti-immigrant folks get so angry when undocumented immigrants fight for their rights. And now they're trying to take even more rights away by, for example, trying to reinterpret the fourteenth amendment that grants citizenship to babies born in the u.s. no matter the status of the mother. I think examining this ambiguity of "rights" is especially relevant on a day such as thanxgiving that is a historical symbol of europeans sense of their "rights" to the land of the new world.

I admit i'm rather ignorant about the definitions of the different types of rights are, as i imagine a number of other people are. I don't believe in government, so talking about rights is a little trickey. I don't believe in god, so i don't believe that rights are given by a god. And i think we can all agree that you don't have to believe in god to believe in rights. I could look up what various philosophers and other thinkers have said about rights, but i don't feel like it, because although it is useful because dead white male thinkers have shaped the western/u.s. idea of "rights" i don't want to place a value on their ideas as opposed to others'.

Let's talk about the ambiguity of rights and the desire by certain people to feel they are entitled to something that others are not who therefore try to shape what others' rights are based on their own entitlement which is often based on racism.

One thing that made me think about this was "You Have No Right," a speech by laine lawless, a controversial pagan lesbian member of tucson-based border guardians who was involved in a public burning of the mexican flag and is also known to have no problem with white supremacist extremists involved in the anti-immigrant movement (hmmm... might that make her a white supremacist extremist?). She says, "You have no right to be here, you have no right to demonstrate and claim the same rights under the Constitution as American citizens."

So it's my understanding that the bill of rights applies to all people in this country and although the constitution does not supply the right to enter the country illegally, it does protect other rights such as to demonstrate and yes, that would mean claiming many of the same rights as American citizens. So does she not agree with the constitution?

This is difficult, because while i agree with many of the rights put forth by the constitution, i do not believe they are rights because they're in the constitution. Meaning, with or without any constitution, i believe in certain rights. Nonetheless, the reality of constitutional rights and such allows me to expose some hypocrisy.

This hypocrisy lies, for example, in the fact that anti-immigrant folks are trying to reinterpret the fourteenth amendment so that it does not give citizenship to anyone born in this country, claiming that it was not written to allow for thousands of babies of undocumented immigrants to have automatic citizenship (more on that here). Yet, anti-immigrant folks in arizona are interpretting a law against human smuggling in order to convict your average recently-crossed undocumented immigrant of conspiracy even though the makers of this fairly new law have said they did not intend for it to be used that way (More info on the charges of conspiracy: Sheriff Joe arrests more immigrants and Immigrant faces up to 4 years for conspiracy. So we have people trying to change the interpretation of an amendment because they say it wasn't intended to give citizenship rights to "anchor babies" and using another law that the authors say was not intended to go after anyone but the smugglers themselves, both in an effort to limit the rights of undocumented immigrants.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who is the Maricopa County Sheriff whose department has been arresting the immigrants on the smuggling conspiracy charge maintains that he's just enforcing the law. That's his job. It's as simple as that. Yet we know that meanwhile there are plenty of laws that are not getting enforced as aggressively as this one and that this is a political ploy and a further effort to repress immigrants.

So my argument is that they don't really care about rights or the constitution or the rule of law, or whatever they want to call it, but they will use it and interpret it in their own interest. Why? Because they feel entitled by their white privilege (and if they're not white, perhaps their loyalty to whiteness) and citizenship to certain rights and access to resources. Unfortunately for them (and the rest of us), many of them don't get much of what they're promised by whiteness, because if less people were exploited, well, then businesses wouldn't be as well off as they are, so working class white folks feel screwed. So the blame is placed on the powerless desperate people who have come here for work, instead of the source of the problem: capitalism/business/the elite. And they f*ck themselves over and all the rest of us by trying to keep getting their piece of the pie and trying to keep those less entitled from even getting any crumbs. And you know who's leading them? White guys who get plenty of pie. They're pushing these fears of outsiders and conspiracies about immigrants taking over and they're laughing all the way to the bank because not only can they continue to exploit the immigrant workers because they keep others from allying with them, they can continue to exploit all workers because they are effectively prevented from joining together and demanding justice.

Throughout history the constitution and ideas about our democracy have been interpretted by the elite and white people in their own interest. That's why it said "all men are created equal" and that people had the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but reality did not reflect that for most people. What do rights and democracy mean when this country was built on genocide, slavery, patriarchy, and colonialism? What does having a nation of laws mean when we break international law? What do civil rights mean when our prison system is of the largest in the world with disproportionately black men in the prisons? What does human rights mean when they're broken everyday by businesses, the military, the police, and the prison system?

So when anti-immigrant folks talk about rights or laws or democracy, pay really close attention to why they're saying what they're saying and whether they're being consistant. Because I guarantee you they're not being sincere about their respect for rights and democracy.

Related videos on youtube:
Amnesty for Illegal Aliens Demonstrations: Round 'em Up! (with Sheriff Joe Arpaio)
Anchor Babies