Artemis II Spacecraft
Civil Rights for Aliens
The United States Declaration of Independence states that,
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”
The American constitutional tradition later rested on the same principle, first declared at the nation’s founding, that “all people are created equal.”
The Constitution’s authors knew the word citizen.
They used it when citizenship was relevant.
Yet when they protected life, liberty, property, due process and equal protection, they chose a broader word…
Person.
That choice expressed one of the deepest principles in American law—that government cannot exercise power over an individual while pretending that the individual is beneath the protection of law.
The Supreme Court has therefore recognized that constitutional protections extend to citizens and may extend to persons who are not citizens.
The law does not ordinarily ask whether someone’s ancestors came from England, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America or anywhere else before deciding whether that person may receive due process. It asks whether a person stands within American governmental authority.
Over time, that principle has come to protect people regardless of whether they are black, tan, white, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, born in the United States, foreign-born, or members of any other group.
A person does not become less deserving of dignity, civil rights, due process, equal protection, or other constitutional protections simply because that person’s ancestors evolved elsewhere.
The whole purpose and importance of equal protection is to ensure that appearance, ancestry, or origin cannot be used as an excuse for unequal treatment.
Everyone living peacefully and according to American law should receive the same constitutional protection, because equality means very little if it applies only to those who look or originate exactly like the majority.
Former President Barack Obama publicly explained that, “Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there.” But “I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!”
Gnostic Fiction surfaces an interesting question.
What if Jews - centuries ago - evolved in another universe?
What would that imply for modern Jewish civil rights in the United States?
What about other U.S. races and ethnicities who ordinarily receive constitutional protection in the United States?
What if YOUR RACE evolved in another universe?
Do YOU know where your ancestors are from?
The Constitution was written to endure beyond the founders’ ability to foresee every circumstance in which its principles would be necessary.
Our constitution and laws must apply equally to everyone.
The constitution must protect you.
The word alien appears only once as a complete sequence of letters in America’s three principal founding documents — inside the Declaration’s promise of unalienable Rights.
Yet the founding generation also used alien independently to describe a person who came from elsewhere. James Madison wrote in The Federalist of “an alien” who was legally denied certain rights, and the early Congress enacted laws expressly governing “aliens.”
Thus, the two ideas existed side by side at the founding…
- An alien was a person regarded as foreign.
- An unalienable right was a right that could not rightfully be separated from its possessor.
That does not prove the founders were referring to beings from other worlds. But it creates an enduring constitutional implication, that a person’s rights cannot become alienable merely because government calls that person an alien.