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WILKES-BARRE &mdash; Who, exactly, are the Constitution&rsquo;s &ldquo;We the People?&rdquo; The concept will be the topic of a virtual lecture hosted by King&rsquo;s College McGowan Center for Ethics and Social Responsibility Thursday evening.
				&ldquo;What should U.S. immigration policy be? U.S. policy toward refugees? Toward people brought to the U.S. as children (&lsquo;childhood arrivals&rsquo;) without documentation?&rdquo; Center Director Bernard Prusak asked in a email announcing the lecture, to be given by Ben Railton, professor of English and coordinator of American Studies at Fitchburg State University.
				&ldquo;Should all people residing in the U.S. be counted in the census? Is everyone born here properly a citizen here? These questions and others like them bear on our &lsquo;idea of America,&rsquo; which will be the topic of our Thursday, 9/17 Constitution Day Lecture,&rdquo; Prusak wrote. 
				The lecture will examine the U.S. Constitution and the 1790 Naturalization Act &ldquo;to help us understand how &lsquo;we the people&rsquo; was debated and constituted in the founding era and to consider how those contested and exclusionary definitions continue to share our twenty-first century political community.
				&ldquo;&rsquo;We the People&rsquo;: Few American phrases are more famous&mdash;or more meaningful&mdash;than the opening three words of the Constitution. But who comprises that &lsquo;we&rsquo;? Who is included in, and who excluded from, that shared, first-person-plural community?
				&ldquo;On one foundational issue, that of religious freedom, the Constitution advances a strikingly inclusive definition of an American &ldquo;we.&rdquo; Article VI&rsquo;s strong statement in opposition to religious tests for elected and government officials exemplifies the document&rsquo;s overall commitment to religious liberty, one that was defended by the Constitution&rsquo;s advocates both at the Constitutional Convention and in the state legislature ratification debates.
				&ldquo;But the Constitution likewise featured a more exclusionary element in its definition of enslaved African Americans as two-thirds of a person for purposes of representation. Further, one of the new nation&rsquo;s first laws, the 1790 Naturalization Act, exemplified this exclusionary vision of America. That act limited the possibility of gaining U.S. citizenship to &lsquo;any alien, being a free white person&rsquo; who had been in the United States for two years.&rdquo;
				The virtual lecture begins at 7 p.m. and is being held via Zoom, with a maximum of 1,000 participants. Registration is required, and the link to register can be found at the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/bgprusak/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">McGowan Center of Ethics and Social Responsibility</a> Facebook page

Defining ‘We the people’ topic of King’s College virtual lecture Thursday