If at first you don't secede...

Well, it's not as silly as that guy that wants you to "unfriend" all Democrats, but it runs a close second.

A Facebook post brought this "story" to my attention:

"15 States including Texas have filed a petition to secede from the United States" (Examiner.com)

I ran a quick Google search for the text of that title, and found that I had more than a million search results. Looking at the first few pages of the Google search showed that the vast majority of these sites were simply copy-and-paste reposts of that same article. (I have no idea where it originated, but the Examiner.com article appears as the source for most of them.) One or two had a different slant on the same material, such as the one that began "If at first you don't succeed, just secede!"

I am heartened by a post at a Prince fan site that prefaced the article with "LOL!" I also found repostings or links at a gay site, an Arabic site and a patriot "militia" site; what a strange place the Internet is.

But most of them were just reposting each other, or citing the Examiner.com article. And there's certainly enough reposts out there for every every red-blooded American God-fearing Liberal-bashing patriot militiaist (my tongue is so firmly in my cheek it hurts) with a computer to have read it. But I don't think that many Democrats or Progressives or Liberals (they're not all the same, you know) have had a look.

And actually, I don't think it deserves as much attention as it's getting, even if most of that attention consists of right-wing sites blogging at each other (they're supposed to be ignoring the rest of us, remember?). I think this "movement" is intended as more of a protest than as a serious attempt to withdraw from the Union.

(Or maybe not. A 2008 Zogby poll claimed that 22% of all Americans believed that any state has the right to secede. But then, Nate Silver has called Zogby "the worst pollster in the world." The only praise for Zogby that I found came from Rupert Murdock's Wall Street Journal. Judge for yourself.)

How legal is it for states to secede, anyway? You'd think that the Civil War would have settled the issue, but it didn't. Many people believe that the states that made up the Confederacy had every right to secede. But that tends to be an emotional argument, even though proponents often cite something in the Declaration of Independence as justification of their position ("...That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it...").

The problem is that I don't think that the Declaration of Independence has any standing in US courts, being written long before the Constitution (thirteen years before, in fact) when the Colonies were still part of Great Britain. And the Constitution itself lacks any provision for secession. Saying that such a provision is implied by the Declaration of Independence just doesn't work.

(People think that Texas is a special case, having been an independent republic before joining the Union, but in 1869 the Supreme Court said otherwise.)

But even if you believe that states do have the right to secede, then it's the state's right. None of this current crop of secession petitions come from the states themselves; rather, they come from individuals or groups within the states. The right of these persons/groups to take this action unilaterally is at best dubious and at worst ridiculous.

Which leaves us with this "secession" movement being just another form of protest. Little more than a paper tiger. And a soggy one at that.

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.