These exempt some convicted pedophiles of “certain offenses” from mandatory sex-offender registration “if the person is not more than 10 years older than the minor” when the minor is between the ages of 14 and 17, leaving the decision to the presiding judge.
Contrary to some claims, SB145 does not legalize pedophilia in California, but the bill, which has passed the California legislature and could be signed by Governor Gavin Newsom, could let a “woke” judge keep a 24-year-old who had sex with a 14-year-old from being required to register as a sex offender.
SB145 was first introduced in January 2019 by California state Senator Scott Wiener, a gay Democrat representing San Francisco.
Wiener argued that SB145 “eliminates discrimination against LGBTQ youth in our criminal justice system” because judges already have this discretion when it comes to consensual vaginal sex between 14-17 year olds and adults less than ten years older than them.
Critics argue that the bill should not have provided the same exemption for other sex acts, but rather removed all exemptions for automatic sex-offender registration to achieve equity.
“I don’t care who it is between or what sex act it is,” Democrat Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez explained.
“That being said, I cannot in my mind as a mother understand how sex between a 24-year-old and a 14-year-old could ever be consensual.”
Most of us, I believe, would agree with Gonzalez, but Wiener, does not. Kamala Harris endorsed him last month.
State Senator Wiener proudly showed off Kamala’s endorsement of his candidacy days after her selection as Joe Biden’s running mate.
“I’ve known & worked with the next Vice President of the United States for nearly 20 years,” he tweeted.
“Kamala Harris also knows me & my work. I’m honored to have Kamala’s endorsement of my reelection to the Senate.”
Kamala Harris, according to Wiener, “knows” him and “his work.” Naturally, we can assume that this includes SB145.
Will the media question Kamala Harris about SB145, and ask whether she supports the idea that a 24-year-old who has sex with a 14-year-old shouldn’t automatically be registered as a sex offender? Don’t count on it.
She’s only running to be the second-most powerful person in the country.
Does the country really want a vice president who supports Scott Wiener and what he stands for?
Should California have created a new exemption for automatic sex-offender registration, or gotten rid of all exemptions? What does Kamala Harris believe?
Do the so-called Republicans who back the Biden-Harris ticket really want those values in the White House?
People are sharing photos of their children at 20 weeks gestation after a tweet from Sen. Kamala Harris in 2018 resurfaced, in which she advocated against a ban on abortions past 20 weeks.
Many people tweeted photos and sonograms of their children at 2o weeks old gestation or earlier, denouncing Harris’s pro-abortion platform and call for a ban.
Others shared photos of babies prematurely born around 20 weeks, fully developed and alive.
Harris is a longtime pro-abortion activist with a long congressional record supporting the movement. She voted against the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act and was a co-sponsor of the Women’s Health Protection Act, which allows abortions without bans. Harris has also notably called for Congress to pass a law affirming the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973.
Harris even received an informal endorsement from Planned Parenthood Action on Twitter.
She also has a 100 percent rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America, a pro-abortion activism group.
While Biden has not been as active as Harris in abortion activism, he said that his presidential platform includes ending the Hyde Amendment, which blocks federal funding of abortions as well as ensuring “safe, legal access to abortion by establishing nationwide protections for abortion that would stand even if Roe v. Wade were overturned by the Supreme Court.”
According to the Mayo Clinic, at 20 weeks, babies in the womb have all of their body parts and become more active in the womb by “regularly sleeping and waking” and becoming “awakened by noises or your movements.” Scientific research also shows that babies can feel pain very early in the womb, suggesting that an abortion would cause immense physical harm and suffering to the baby before death if performed.
Editor's note: Some readers reacted strongly to this essay, seeing it as an attempt to ignite a racist conspiracy theory. That is entirely inaccurate, as this Note explains.
The fact that Senator Kamala Harris has just been named the vice presidential running mate for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has some questioning her eligibility for the position. The 12th Amendment provides that "no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States." And Article II of the Constitution specifies that "[n]o person except a natural born citizen...shall be eligible to the office of President." Her father was (and is) a Jamaican national, her mother was from India, and neither was a naturalized U.S. citizen at the time of Harris' birth in 1964. That, according to these commentators, makes her not a "natural born citizen"—and therefore ineligible for the office of the president and, hence, ineligible for the office of the vice president.
"Nonsense," runs the counter-commentary. Indeed, PolitiFact rated the claim of ineligibility as "Pants on Fire" false, Snopes rated it simply "False," and from the other side of the political spectrum, Conservative Daily News likewise rated it "False." All three (and numerous others) simply assert that Harris is eligible because she was born in Oakland—and is therefore a natural-born citizen from location of birth. The 14th Amendment says so, they all claim, and the Supreme Court so held in the 1898 case of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark.
The language of Article II is that one must be a natural-born citizen. The original Constitution did not define citizenship, but the 14th Amendment does—and it provides that "all persons born...in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens." Those who claim that birth alone is sufficient overlook the second phrase. The person must also be "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States, and that meant subject to the complete jurisdiction, not merely a partial jurisdiction such as that which applies to anyone temporarily sojourning in the United States (whether lawfully or unlawfully). Such was the view of those who authored the 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause; of the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1872 Slaughter-House Cases and the 1884 case of Elk v. Wilkins; of Thomas Cooley, the leading constitutional treatise writer of the day; and of the State Department, which, in the 1880s, issued directives to U.S. embassies to that effect.
The Supreme Court's subsequent decision in Wong Kim Ark is not to the contrary. At issue there was a child born to Chinese immigrants who had become lawful, permanent residents in the United States—"domiciled" was the legally significant word used by the Court. But that was the extent of the Court's holding (as opposed to broader language that was dicta, and therefore not binding). Indeed, the Supreme Court has never held that anyone born on U.S. soil, no matter the circumstances of the parents, is automatically a U.S. citizen.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA)
Granted, our government's view of the Constitution's citizenship mandate has morphed over the decades to what is now an absolute "birth on the soil no matter the circumstances" view—but that morphing does not appear to have begun until the late 1960s, after Kamala Harris' birth in 1964. The children born on U.S. soil to guest workers from Mexico during the Roaring 1920s were not viewed as citizens, for example, when, in the wake of the Great Depression, their families were repatriated to Mexico. Nor were the children born on U.S. soil to guest workers in the bracero program of the 1950s and early 1960s deemed citizens when that program ended, and their families emigrated back to their home countries.
So before we so cavalierly accept Senator Harris' eligibility for the office of vice president, we should ask her a few questions about the status of her parents at the time of her birth.
Were Harris' parents lawful permanent residents at the time of her birth? If so, then under the actual holding of Wong Kim Ark, she should be deemed a citizen at birth—that is, a natural-born citizen—and hence eligible. Or were they instead, as seems to be the case, merely temporary visitors, perhaps on student visas issued pursuant to Section 101(15)(F) of Title I of the 1952 Immigration Act? If the latter were indeed the case, then derivatively from her parents, Harris was not subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States at birth, but instead owed her allegiance to a foreign power or powers—Jamaica, in the case of her father, and India, in the case of her mother—and was therefore not entitled to birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment as originally understood.
I have no doubt that this significant challenge to Harris' constitutional eligibility to the second-highest office in the land will be dismissed out of hand as so much antiquated constitutional tripe. But the concerns about divided allegiance that led our nation's Founders to include the "natural-born citizen" requirement for the office of president and commander-in-chief remain important; indeed, with persistent threats from Russia, China and others to our sovereignty and electoral process, those concerns are perhaps even more important today. It would be an inauspicious start for any campaign for the highest offices in the land to ignore the Constitution's eligibility requirements; how else could we possibly expect the candidates, if elected, to honor their oaths to "faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and...to the best of [their] Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?"Interestingly, this recitation of the original meaning of the 14th Amendment Citizenship Clause might also call into question Harris' eligibility for her current position as a United States senator. Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution specifies that to be eligible for the office of senator, one must have been "nine Years a Citizen of the United States." If Harris was not a citizen at birth, we would need to know when (if ever) she became a citizen. Her father's biographical page at Stanford University identifies his citizenship status as follows: "Jamaica (by birth); U.S. (by naturalization)." But there is some dispute over whether he was in fact ever naturalized, and it is also unclear whether Harris' mother ever became a naturalized citizen. If neither was ever naturalized, or at least not naturalized before Harris' 16th birthday (which would have allowed her to obtain citizenship derived from their naturalization under the immigration law, at the time), then she would have had to become naturalized herself in order to be a citizen. That does not appear to have ever happened, yet without it, she could not have been "nine Years a Citizen of the United States" before her election to the U.S. Senate.
