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So you’ve decided to go snarky after all. Bad decision.

You have accused me of being of limited comprehension more than once. Ironically, you are proving that YOU are the one with limited comprehension.

The reason I continue to say you haven’t answered my simple question is, well, simple. You replied to my question with a question. IOW, you asked me if that was what I was arguing. You were NOT saying that was what you were agreeing to.

Now on to the main thing. Justice Gray, in writing the majority opinion in this case, was building a Proof (you have taken Logic or Geometry in school, haven’t you?) that Wong Kim Ark was a CITIZEN. He was not building a Proof that WKA was a natural-born citizen.

To that end, he pulled together all of the supportive cases and quotes related to citizenship that he could find. Some were related to citizenship, others to various sub-sets of citizenship - some to naturalized citizenship, some to native-born citizenship, and still others to natural-born subjects. There is even one quote he resorted to that differentiates between natural-born citizens, natural-born subjects, and the native-born. Imagine that.

In none of his Proof was he defining natural-born citizenship, which is a sub-set of citizenship, but rather, making the case for WKA’s citizenship. If he had been trying to define natural-born citizenship, he would have directly done so at some point. He didn’t. Every mention of natural-born citizenship is a quote from someone else.

But you won’t come to that true understanding by pulling selected quotes from the opinion. You have to read the entire opinion at one sitting to comprehend the full meaning of what Justice Gray was doing.

BTW, concerning your ‘answer’ that you repeated 4 times, Justice Gray himself didn’t say anything about natural-born citizenship. Rather, he quoted others saying different things about natural citizenship, as he built a Proof for his decision in favor of WKA’s citizenship.

I don't give away cheap points. As I've said, your question is poorly posed. You created a false dichotomy: either Wong Kim Ark is about citizenship, or it is about "natural-born" citizenship, but not both.

If I have to respond to such a question, I can do so only by qualifying my answer. Of course I do not agree with you that there actually is such an either/or choice for Wong Kim Ark. You yourself now admit that Justice Gray did, in fact, discuss what "natural-born" means, thereby showing how your dichotomy is a farce; that Justice Gray concluded that Mr. Wong was "merely" a citizen does not negate his analysis of the meaning of "natural-born."

As for your alleged "true understanding," what part of "The same rule was in force...in the United States afterwards, and continued to prevail under the Constitution as originally established" don't you understand? There are no quotation marks anywhere in those two paragraphs. The initial paragraph even begins with "It thus clearly appears that,..." Sounds oddly like a definition to me.

It appears that you have finally understood my answer. Yes, Justice Gray didn't say anything about "natural-born" citizenship in that paragraph. So you now know why I added the word only and placed quotation marks around it. I don't know for how long you had that paragraph in mind, but surely, you should've noticed that my ellipses quotation came directly from it. It would've saved the two of us a few posts.

Since the likelihood of my actually getting a definition of "natural-born" from you is almost zero, I'll make it easy for you. Why don't you tell me why Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen under the definition below?

It thus clearly appears that, by the law of England for the last three centuries, beginning before the settlement of this country and continuing to the present day, aliens, while residing in the dominions possessed by the Crown of England, were within the allegiance, the obedience, the faith or loyalty, the protection, the power, the jurisdiction of the English Sovereign, and therefore every child born in England of alien parents was a natural-born subject unless the child of an ambassador or other diplomatic agent of a foreign State or of an alien enemy in hostile occupation of the place where the child was born.

III. The same rule was in force in all the English Colonies upon this continent down to the time of the Declaration of Independence, and in the United States afterwards, and continued to prevail under the Constitution as originally established.