{"id":23949,"date":"2020-12-11T15:55:05","date_gmt":"2020-12-11T20:55:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/?p=23949"},"modified":"2020-12-14T12:18:12","modified_gmt":"2020-12-14T17:18:12","slug":"morel-character-citizenship-test-archaic-immigrationreform-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/2020\/12\/11\/morel-character-citizenship-test-archaic-immigrationreform-com\/","title":{"rendered":"Big City Newspaper Runs Op-ed Questioning Why \u201cHabitual Drunkenness\u201d Should Be a Disqualification for Citizenship"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer\u2019s opinion page stopped me in my tracks. \u2018Habitual drunkenness\u2019 is not a reason to deny someone like me U.S. citizenship<\/a><\/em>, it read. I checked again to make sure that I was actually looking at the most important newspaper in the nation\u2019s sixth largest city, and had not accidently (drunkenly) stumbled over to The Onion\u2019s website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No, I was still on the Inquirer\u2019s site, and the opinion column was not written by someone who had downed a few too many at a local tavern (the bars are all closed due to COVID, in any event) and wandered into paper\u2019s building. It was authored by one Abraham Gutman<\/a>, a staff editorial writer whom the paper (presumably) pays to pen sober commentary on important issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gutman has lived in the\nUnited States for all of nine years and is going through the process of\nbecoming a citizen and preparing for the citizenship test, which he describes\nas, \u201cexpensive, discriminatory and just got much harder to pass thanks to\nDonald Trump.\u201d (Apparently newspaper editors can\u2019t handle high school civics\nquestions \u2013 but cheer up, Mr. Gutman, at least there\u2019s no math on the test.)\nBut while he was cramming for the exam, one question \u201ccaught me off guard,\u201d he\nsays: Have you EVER<\/strong> been a habitual drunkard?<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI found the line of\nquestioning on drug and alcohol use, and the entire concept of a medical\ncheckup, off-putting,\u201d he writes. \u201cIt\u2019s time to delete questions about drug and\nalcohol use on immigration applications.\u201d Because, why wouldn\u2019t we want to make\ncitizens out of foreign drug addicts and alcoholics? Don\u2019t we want to be\ninclusive?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Substance abuse is a\ndisease (though at some point in the process it involved personal choice), and\nwe should not make light of it, or lack compassion for those who struggle with\naddiction. But that does not mean that when a nation considers people for\ncitizenship that it should not take into account moral character, including an\nexpectation that the applicant is likely to be habitually productive and\nhabitually sober.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than anything,\nGutman\u2019s column describing assessments of moral character in considering\ncitizenship applications to be \u201carchaic,\u201d and the fact that these opinions are\ngiven space on the pages of a major U.S. daily newspaper, speaks volumes about\nelitist contempt for the nation and the core values that made it great. It is\nindicative of why so many of our elite are for what amounts to open borders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gutman never tells us how he answered the question about whether he is a \u201chabitual drunkard.\u201d But perhaps he was inspired by the scene in the 1942 classic film, <\/a>Casablanca<\/a><\/em> (set, appropriately, in a bar), in which Major Strasser, a Nazi officer, interrogates Rick Blaine the American nightclub owner (played by Humphrey Bogart) in the presence of Captain Renault, the obedient Vichy French prefect:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Major Strasser: <\/strong>What is your nationality?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rick Blaine: <\/strong>I\u2019m a drunkard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Captain Renault:<\/strong> That makes Rick a citizen of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Life imitates art.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer\u2019s opinion page stopped me in my tracks. \u2018Habitual drunkenness\u2019 is not a reason to deny someone like me U.S. citizenship, it read. I checked again to make sure that I was actually looking at the most important newspaper in the nation\u2019s sixth largest city, and had not accidently (drunkenly)<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":23793,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[7],"tags":[540,1524,668,940],"yst_prominent_words":[10594,2157,10585,1978,4461,10591,10589,10592,10587,10588,10593,5358,3087,5183,2438,5334,10590,10586,10595,1939],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23949"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23949"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23950,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23949\/revisions\/23950"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23949"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.immigrationreform.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=23949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}