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Junius Brutus said 02/27, 04:57 PM
for reference ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

your main points seem to boil down to these:
1) Due to an excessively complicated legal system, 'due process' is hard to ascertain and winds up in the revocation of other rights.
- What are these rights you refer to? How are they being revoked? Even just taking your stmt at face value, the solution for individual rights being revoked is to revoke individual rights? Seems like this argument needs to ferment a little longer.

2) It's a detriment to the community to have 'people running around bearing all sorts of protection'.
- this is so broad and all-encompassing that it's truly terrifying. Surely you're not suggesting that everyone should be without protections? That the police should be able to detain anyone indefinitely without bothering with the niceties of law? That civil authorities should be able to arbitrarily deprive anyone of property without jumping through any legal hoops? Implicit in your statement is the idea that 'other people' are the problem and shouldn't have the rights you do. That's simply not the way democracy works.

Junius Brutus said 02/27, 07:46 PM
I don't believe I suggested that Wikipedia is a democracy - it just seemed an easy way to give readers the text of the 14th amendment rather than taking up my 1200 characters to do so.

In your second post, you still haven't established a causal link between the 14th amendment and revocation of any rights, and in fact haven't established that any rights are being revoked at all. (COPS and Law & Order are fictional shows that have no weight as evidence, otherwise we'd have to conclude from Battlestar Galactica that faster-than-light travel is possible). If anything, you seem to be claiming that 'new' rights are being created, rather than the opposite.

With regard to your third 'point', the 14th Amendment doesn't say what you're claiming - the only reference to 'crime' in the amendment is in Section 2, with regard to how representatives are allocated, and does NOT mandate any loss of rights in that section. The only 'loss of rights' being mandated is in Section 3, which disallows public office for anyone who has (a) sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution, and then (b) broken that oath by participation in a rebellion or insurrection against the US.

Junius Brutus said 02/29, 12:15 PM
Wow - those are a lot of assertions in 1200 characters.
1) It's a tenuous assertion to say that AMD 14 broadened the definition of citizenship. It stated that a person was a person and should be counted as a person, rather than as 3/5 of a person. Are you actually suggesting we should reverse that?
2) I don't know what tortured logic gets you from there to your next stmt about Mexicans being American citizens (or the belief that that's the case). In any case it's irrelevant, as you've moved from what the AMD *states* to what people *believe it implies*, which is not an argument for revoking the amendment.
3) How you get from there to Americans having 'rights commensurate with Mexican citizenship' (whatever that means) is also unclear.
4) If you're going to assert that arrests are reversed based on ethnicity, you need to provide something to back that statement up.
5) I believe we *are* discussing history, in that the 14th AMD is a historical fact.
6) I've seen several political cartoons recently.
7) English, the language we're debating in, is 'my language'.
8) I seem to recall using US dollars in all my recent purchases

You're ranting. And raving. And wrong.