Is Superman a U.S. Citizen?

Not long ago I was embroiled in a debate with a friend; the question was if Clark Kent is a legal citizen of the United States, does that technically meant he could be drafted?

That got me thinking: What makes Clark Kent a legal citizen of the United States?

The basic origins for Superman are almost globally known and have been retold so many times that I really don’t need to cite chapter and verse when I refer them, but for the sake of narrative, I will. As told in the film Man of Steel, the planet Krypton was doomed and Jor-El, resident super-scientist, built an experimental spacecraft to launch his son, Kal-El into space so that he would land on Earth where the people around him looked like him, but the planet would give him amazing super powers.

Kal-El’s crashed ship is found in a field in Kansas and the baby is taken in by John and Martha Kent, who raise him as Clark Kent of Smallville.

Now, again, what makes Clark Kent a United States citizen? I’ve heard the argument that since he was born on another planet, he is technically an illegal alien…but that’s not entirely accurate. Kal-El was effectively abandoned by circumstance when his parents died on Krypton. There is no way for him to return to his originating country and that falls clearly under the realm of “abandonment”. Given that the state has no possible way of contacting or returning the child to the birth parents, they would willingly sign off on the adoption simply to prevent the child from entering the foster care system. It should be remembered that Smallville was a rural area, so their resources were very scarce and it would have unnecessarily taxed the legal offices to have the state take control of the child. This is especially true since, if we use the Man of Steel as our jumping off point, this is probably about 1977-1979. The child was abandoned in a field, and there were a pair of parents willing to take custody of said child.

Now you don’t have to be a strange visitor from another world to make this leap in logic; the obvious question is, “How would the authorities know that the Kents didn’t kidnap the child?” Well, John and Martha were well known in their community and the community was small with probably a very low percentage of births per year. People would have noticed a pregnant woman in town and then really noticed if she disappeared shortly before she was due to give birth. People in small farming towns are notoriously nosey, and I’m not making a blanket statement there, I know from personal experience.

Anyway, when the Kents presented the child to the court, an effort would have been made to check the surrounding areas to see if anyone reported a missing child or a missing pregnant woman. Since neither would turn up, they would have decided that since there was no way of contacting the birth parents then John and Martha could keep the child provided they held to visits from the state and once the state was satisfied they would have stopped the visits and just awarded them full custody of the child, now named Clark Kent. This wouldn’t have taken very long; you are looking at maybe a year from abandonment to full adoption, maybe a year and a half.

It’s at this point that a new lineage is created. Clark Kent is now the direct descendant, legally speaking, to John and Martha Kent, and as they are citizens of the United States, so is Clark.

Now when I turned 18, I had to register with Selective Services. What is that?

“Registration is a way our government keeps a list of names of men from which to draw in case of a national emergency requiring rapid expansion of our Armed Forces. By registering all young men, Selective Service ensures that a future draft will be fair and equitable.”

Now, we have not seen a draft since the conflict in Vietnam, however, that doesn’t mean it cannot happen. If the United States desperately needed the troops for any conflict from 1998 to 2006, then Clark Kent could have been selected and put into military service. By virtue of Clark obtaining a driver’s license, he could easily have been picked, which would have raised some more interesting questions.

So does that make Superman a legal citizen?

No.

Confused? Well, let me explain. In Action Comics #900 Superman announces his intent to give up his U.S. citizenship as his actions are being seen globally as an enforcement of U.S. policy and he wants to be seen as a hero to the world, not just America. There is, however a problem with that. Superman can say that all he wants, he can make a symbolic gesture towards that, but unless Clark Kent wants to go through the courts and have his ties to John and Martha Kent cut, he is still a United States citizen. Superman is not a legal entity. For clarification, consider “Superman” a self or publicly appointed title or nickname rather than an actual name. It’s like my old reviewing handle of “Sidewinder.” It’s not a legal name, I can’t sign any binding contract with that name, and neither can Superman. Superman can’t get a driver’s license or a social security card, because from a legal standpoint Superman doesn’t exist. Ergo, Superman as a hero can announce that he does not serve the standards, practices, and policies of the United States, but he can’t renounce his citizenship because he has no citizenship under that name.

Consequently, Kal-El doesn’t exist either. At least, he didn’t after the adoption took place. Remember that adoption creates a new lineage, and since there is no Jor-El or Krypton to contend the issue, that old lineage is severed and Kal-El is renamed Clark Kent. Kal-El may be a name he refers to, when addressing his Kryptonian heritage, but as far as Uncle Sam is concerned, he’s Clark.

Then there’s the question of him being human, or rather, not human. Now, at the time that Clark’s adoption became legal and binding, there was no indication to anyone involved that he was not human. It’s that whole “walks like a duck…” analogy. Outwardly there is nothing to indicate he is anything other than a human child, so there is no reason for any court not to consider him a human male. Courts don’t go into DNA testing; at least they didn’t circa 1977-85 for adoption, and there is no precedent for “species status” set down in any state or federal law.

The final question is: Can you contend that he’s not human and thus have his civil rights removed? Well, that’s a stickier issue because you’d have to take it to court and have the court address what it is to be “human”, however, the films and comics may have already headed this one off at the pass…as it were. In Superman Returns, we discover that Clark has a biological child with Lois Lane. Since separate species don’t breed well, that technically means Superman is actually human. He’s a different race of human with different racial characteristics, but on a base DNA level, he’s still human. His sperm was able to fertilize a human egg and the result was a human, biracial child. Maybe that’s the issue there. Kryptonians are nothing more than a separate race of humans who adapted to their environment and thus, when introduced to our environment, those adaptations manifested and had side effects as super powers.

What would drive this argument further home is if, like a really engaging “Elseworlds” series that directly addresses the lineage of Superman after the birth of his first child, that child were to have children of their own. To clarify that, when you breed a donkey and a horse, you get a mule, but you won’t get a mule and a mule to breed because they come out barren. That’s because they are still separate species. Likewise when you breed a tiger and a lion, you get a liger, but the liger is often infertile because, again, separate species. If Lois and Clark’s child were to have children of his own, then that would indicate they were the same species.

Which means that whenever they write Batman as not liking Superman because he’s an alien, it actually means Batman is racist.

Thanks for reading.

Superman, Batman and all the related material to such characters is the property of DC Comics and Warner Bros. Entertainment.