Excerpts from a news article:
"Activists in all 50 states upset with the reelection of President
Barack Obama have utilized the
White House’s “We the People” online
petition website to call for
secession,
The Daily Caller reported earlier today."
“By 6:00 a.m. EST Wednesday, more than 675,000 digital signatures appeared on 69 separate secession petitions covering all 50 states,” the report documents, adding “Petitions from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas residents have accrued at least 25,000 signatures, the number the Obama administration says it will reward with a staff review of online proposals.”
The petition from Texas alone has accrued over 100,000 signatures at this writing. But backing off from a 2009 suggestion to a Tea Party gathering that succession might be an option for the Lone Star State, Governor Rick Perry distanced himself from the petition.
Still, while some recall the words of the
Declaration of Independence, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,” words incidentally included in the backdrop behind the presidential candidates during the debates (see photo accompanying this column), others take even stronger exception.
A counter-petition asking the president to “sign an executive order such that each American citizen who signed a petition from any state to secede from the USA shall have their citizenship stripped and be peacefully deported” has gathered over 10,000 signatures since it was created two days ago.
While that may be laughable, albeit illustrative to show the contempt the tyrannically-inclined have for
First Amendment political expression, particularly as it applies to a supposedly sacrosanct right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,”
would-be secessionists should exercise caution in the way they publicly express their dissent, lest they unintentionally run afoul of a provision in federal law that directly applies to gun owners.
Among the enumerated
disqualifying triggers in U.S. Code rendering one a prohibited person, forbidden by federal law to own a gun, is someone “who, having been a citizen of the United States, has renounced his citizenship.”
Read the entire article here.