Editor’s note: This is Part 2 of an essay on birthright citizenship. Click here to read Part 1.

(LifeSiteNews) — Most Americans are completely ignorant about the highly vaunted federal Constitution. Their ideas come from the warping, bending, and twisting of the document that began even under George Washington, when he signed into law the Bank of the United States, the precursor of today’s Federal Reserve.

Most Americans don’t understand the truth about secession, that prohibitions against it were rejected in the 1787 constitutional convention, or that Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams are undeniably on record as endorsing the concept. Americans have come to believe that “union” and “constitution” are one and the same thing because, well, that’s what Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln thought.

The idea that a government should control its own definitions of citizenship is a natural law concept, expounded in the concluding paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence with the following phrase: “they [the states] have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”

The business of “birthright citizenship” emerges from the illegally approved 14th Amendment. You heard me right. It is an utterly illegitimate child and does not belong in the Constitution, because its approval wantonly violated Article V, which tells us how an amendment to the Constitution is to be approved. I will deal with this incontrovertible fact later. Suffice it to say that it was denounced as illegal in 1867 by President Andrew Johnson, in measured and scholarly law reviews, in academic textbooks, on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1966, and even in a 1957 article in U.S. News and World Report.

I have begged pro-lifers to please stop using the 14th as a wedge to protect the unborn child because of this, and because the Declaration of Independence already covers the right to life. No one should be reminded that it was the 14th, and not the 9th Amendment, that was cited in the Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade, and Obergefell decisions. While the 9th admits that the Constitution cannot list all of our God-given rights, the 14th had three words that gave the federal government power to destroy state sovereignty: “No state shall …”

Thus, the entire edifice which liberals and Democrats use to demand birthright citizenship is illegitimate. Here’s why:

In Article V of the Constitution, we have the hard-and-fast rules about the usual way for an amendment to the Constitution to be approved. We must have 2/3 of the House, 2/3 of the Senate and 3/4 of the state legislatures approve it. It is intentionally difficult to do. Also in Article V is this vitally important sentence: “And that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.” We will prove right here, with the geometric logic that Captain Queeg lacked in The Caine Mutiny, that the 14th Amendment cheated in all these respects.

When Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, Lincoln already had a plan to restore the union with as little disturbance as possible. Whatever criticism I have for Lincoln’s entire justification for that horrific war, his magnanimity towards the ravaged and defeated South was undeniable.

READ: USCCB slams Trump order to end birthright citizenship as ‘immoral’

And this did not sit well with the Radical Republicans, who were the linear descendants of the Jacobins of the French Revolution. That they did not use the guillotine or hangman’s rope is to their credit, but the uncounted civilian deaths by starvation and shelling of Vicksburg, Atlanta, Charleston, and Columbia, plus the huge swath of destruction throughout Georgia in Sherman’s March, rests squarely on their heads. These civilians have never been counted in the over 600,000 deaths attributed to this fratricidal war.

Lincoln fully knew of their vindictive character and meant to restore the union in April 1865 before Congress convened in December. He was not going to call a special session, as the Radicals were demanding.

Lincoln’s plan was simple. To re-enter the union, 1) the eleven seceded southern states needed to have at least 10 percent of the registered voters of 1860 take an oath of allegiance; 2) their legislatures were told to approve the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery; and 3) then they could hold congressional elections and send their delegations to Washington in December.

Every one of the seceded states complied and sent their representatives to D.C. But Lincoln and his sky-high reputation were now dead; Andrew Johnson, a lifelong Democrat but pro-union southerner from Tennessee, was distrusted; and Congress, now under Radical control, absolutely refused to seat the southern members.

Thus, the southern states were not on hand to argue, obstruct, or amend the proposed 14th Amendment. This was a total violation of Article V and that pesky “equal suffrage” thing, but this was only the first one. The 14th Amendment’s passage by the required 2/3 majority was thus assured, and then a very, very strange thing happened.

Because Lincoln had already used the 13th Amendment as a requirement for re-entry into the union, it was now used for a second time as a condition for re-entry under a Congress controlled by Radicals. But hold on there!

How can a non-state approve an amendment to the Constitution?

The situation boggles the mind. The entire war was fought on the premise that no state could secede, but now these very Radicals were admitting that they did. So the southern states were to be considered as non-states (“state suicide” and “conquered province” were terms the Radicals used) in regard to representation in Congress, but as officially recognized states when it came to approving an amendment! … An amendment which was crafted without their input.

And when those southern states finally did approve the 14th to regain entry, it was done under coercion by occupation of federal troops, carpetbag representatives, and the former slaves who had entered various state legislatures.

This was a fantasy world of mental gymnastics worthy of anything our 21st century politicians, who question the humanity of the unborn and demand “fluid” gender identity, might concoct.

Thus, we have constructed an entirely bogus jurisprudence of case law, for now over 160 years, over an illegitimate amendment that has killed — through abortion, IVF, and IUDs (by low estimate), and by using the flimsy device of Supreme Court case law — 100 times more persons than in our misbegotten and misnamed “Civil War.”

And now the equally illegitimate case law construct of “birthright citizenship.”

Are you unhappy reading this? Go research it yourself, and by all means think for yourself. But now many will understand why, for decades, I have tried to get pro-lifers to stop using the 14th Amendment to protect the unborn child. It is not necessary. The Declaration of Independence already protects them, because God is recognized in that document, as is His natural law, and the Declaration is, in fact, the basic constitution that grants legitimacy to everything that has followed it within the context of American government.