No state that petitions the American Congress to join our union should believe it is about to enter a political and economic paradise. America is not heaven and it is often hellish to live in America if you can’t find a good job. But in whatever condition you find yourself, America does supply you with democracy and unalienable rights. Some of our states have been democracies since 1787 and all of our 50 states are now solid democracies. They are democratic because they choose to be democratic but also because the Federal Government must by law not allow them to be anything else. Article IV, Section 4 of the US Constitution reads, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government”. Full sovereignty in a state means that citizens must obey laws without the power to challenge them. Every law passed by any of our American governments at any level can be challenged in courts and overturned. France used its sovereign power to establish by law same-sex marriage in 2013. In 2004, the supreme court of the state of Massachusetts heard an appeal from a judgment in a lower court against  same-sex marriage and ruled that Massachusetts did not have the right to deny marriage to anyone. A democratic nation-state like France awards citizens rights from a top-down position of supreme sovereign power. In a state like Massachusetts with limited sovereignty, democracy operates both top-down and bottom-up. One citizen, challenging a court’s judgment against same-sex marriage, established from the bottom-up the universal right in Massachusetts for all its citizens to marry.


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