About Those ‘Huddled Masses’

[Draggingtree]

The Other McCain: About Those ‘Huddled Masses’

Posted on | April 14, 2016 |

 

Mark Steyn takes aim at Emma Lazarus:

 

UN Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour, who insisted that there’s no difference between the once supposedly unassimilable Irish Catholics and East European Jews and the new Pushtun goatherds and Mogadishu hoodlums. It’s one of the curious aspects of self-proclaimed “multiculturalists” that they are, essentially, uniculturalists: they think everybody’s the same.

But sometimes history doesn’t repeat itself — and Emma Lazarus’ lousy poem is an even lousier guide to social policy.

 

Was her poem “The New Colossus” really that bad? No, I think the problem is in the interpretation, in the same way that the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment has become a problem. In the minds of some people, among them Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is a python that swallows whole the rest of the Constitution, including the First and Tenth Amendments, so that the entire purpose of the federal government, according to this view, is to impose “equality” everywhere.