John over at the fantastic Sentry Journal has a tale of the strange. I'm pretty much gonna steal his entire post, but it's too good to edit.
Last week my wife and I decided to stop at Burger King for a quick bite to eat. Burger King is currently running a promotional game called Family Food. It’s a scratch game that ask you a question and gives you three possible answers. You of course must select the correct answer in order to have an opportunity to win a prize. The prizes range from food to cash. We pulled the game piece off my large ice tea and she read the question to me. I correctly answered the question and won a $25 dollar gift certificate.
We presented the winning game piece to the employee behind the counter and she informed my wife that we would have to mail the game piece into Burger King in a blue envelop she handed to us. In order to redeem the prize you must provide your social security number to prove you’re are U.S. citizens. When my wife informed the employee that she wasn’t comfortable writing her social security number down on an envelop and sending to people she didn’t know, the employee told her it was the only way we could prove citizenship in order to redeem the prize. The point of the story is if you can’t even redeem cash prizes from Burger King’s Family Food Game without proof of U.S. citizenship, then what’s the big deal about providing some form of ID to prove who you are at the polling stations on election day. I wonder why we don’t hear the cries from the left on how Burger King is disenfranchising non U.S. citizens with their Family Food game.
The mind reels.
We live in a schizophrenic country. To be fair, most of the time America does a good job of hiding it's wackiness. In fact us Yanks are probably the best at keeping our various neuroses out of public view. Hell, there are nations that parade their insanity on a global stage. Compared to that, the US is a model of restraint.
But every once in a while, we get confronted with our own mind-wrenching goofiness. This is one of those times.
Ponder the situation: Burger King, a fast food chain, runs a contest. If you win one of these BK prizes, you must present a form of identification to the company in order to claim your winnings. If John wants that $25, he has to, in effect, show his papers.
These kinds of rules seem to be fairly common; most US companies that run contests like this stipulate that only American citizens are eligible to win prizes in the United States. Further, these sorts of contest bylaws don't raise any hackles in the Bedwetter Community. Nobody whines about 'discrimination' or 'lack of access'. Citizenship as a requirement for eligibility in a company's promotional game is one of those unquestioned parts of American life.
Say, you know what part of American life the thumbsucker caucus questions over and over and over and over again? This whole crazy mixed-up terribly-cliched old-fogie 'citizenship' dealie. Why should citizenship confer any privileges? What's so special about the US and A anyhow? Why shouldn't anyone be able to walk into a voting booth without getting hassled by some stuffy government bureaucrat who has a wacky hang-up about 'rules' or 'citizenship status' or 'laws' or Constitutional requirements'?
Remember what I said about schizophrenia?
The open-borders crowd, ethnic grievance groups and the Left--but I repeat myself three times--have helped create a situation where a person winning a $25 prize from a burger joint has to prove he's a US citizen, but a person voting for President does not.
That, my friends, should be the textbook definition of insanity, at least when it comes to national policy.
More importantly, it cannot be allowed to stand.
Either we give a shit about who votes in our elections or we don't. Either citizenship confers real tangible benefits to the people who have it or it doesn't. If the only thing being a citizen gets you is a Burger King crown, being American has become meaningless.
