I yield to no one in opposing the re-election of President Obama (and in having previously opposed his election in 2008), yet the strength of those desires does not blind me to facts pertaining to the claims that Obama is not a "natural born citizen." Videos (and articles) challenging what the Republican Governor of Hawaii confirmed in 2008 contain so many specious arguments that it's tiresome that they continue re-surfacing, and this video is no less specious.
First, NOWHERE in the U.S. Constitution does it require that for a person born in the United States to be deemed a "natural born" citizen it must be also shown that both of such person's parents were already United States citizens.
Read it for yourself-- It's not rocket science:
The Fourteenth Amendment states:
All persons born or naturalized
in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. (Italics added by me] Source:
https://archives.gov/exhibits/charters/ ... 11-27.html . (This was not a situation such as a child being born in the U.S. with both parents being foreign diplomats and thus
immune from criminal prosecution under laws of the United States and thereby subject to diplomatic laws allowing their removal as
personnae non gratis.)
This section applies disjunctively to two classes of "persons": (a) those "born" ... in the United States" and (b) those "naturalized" in the United States. Other provisions of the Costitution confer upon Congress the power to define, and prescribe requirements for, "naturalized" citizenship, but NOWWHERE does the Constitution limit the term "born" with language to limit its meaning to a person "born" of parents having U.S. citizenship (by birth or otherwise.)
For a court to construe the Constitutional recognition of citizenship to "All persons born ... in the United States" as impliedly requiring that such persons' parents must be citizens would constitute what most of us favoring common-sense interpretation of the Cosntitution would unhesitatingly (and correctly) characterize as "legislating from the bench."
It's not rocket science to discern that a person aquiring U.S. Citizenship by the process of being "born" in the United States is a "natural born" citizen. The Founders were not using "natural born" to distinguish vaginal deliveries from Caesarean-section deliveries but rather to the process of being "born" at a location within the United States.
It should be reasonably obvious to anyone not blinded by political/ideological opposition to Obama that Michelle Obama's reference to Kenya as Barack Obama's "home country" was no different than when many of us as Americans refer to countries of our parents/grantparents
etc. as our "home" countries. It's just a figure of speech.
The audio snippets of Obama repeating accusations made by others (
e.g., "I was born in Kenya") were obviously not asserted by Obama as true but rather for the purpose of describing the accusations. Limbaugh does this (quite effectively) quite often when he says with sarcasm: (I'm paraphrasing): "We conservatives just want children to starve,"
etc. when he's in the process of mocking his opposition's accusations against him in particular and conservatives in general.
Regarding the adoption issues, for centuries, a child born in the U.S. of one parent with American citizenship and the other parent with a foreign citizenship thereby acquires dual citizenship. It it true that an American citizen can lose his/her citizenship by renouncing it or by adopting the citizenship of another country in which the laws of such other country require such renunciation for citizenship to be granted/recognized in such other country, but a parent can't renounce the American citizenship of the parent's minor child. Only the child can do that after reaching majority (adulthood).
These kinds of specious claims and arguments serve Obama best by enabling his supporters to paint all his opponents with the same brushes with which creators of videos such as this one deserve to be painted.
Finally, that there may be some arguable flaws in the process by which Obama's subordinates recently published a "long form birth certificate" doesn't alter the fact that none of such flaws is competent to undermine the fundamental question of whether he was born in Hawaii rather than merely whether the process of proof involved a number of relatively easily explainable flaws.
There are, no doubt, many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans whose birth records evince flaws and errors. Starting typing data onto a form on one typewriter and then making corrections on a different one or making corrections by reinserting the papber back into the same typewriter and then failing or being unable to precisely realign the paper on the platen with whatever was the original position both vertically and horizontally. Many people today forget the imprecision of the old typewriter instruments and the manner in which people used them-- especially when they're in a hurry or concentrating on other things.
A different question remains unanswered pertaining to his college records. Inexplicably, the same media that demanded the most trivial details about George W. Bush's college records seems to suffer from a total lack of curiosity regarding why Obama has refused to release his college records. it's certainly legitimate to demand that he authorize release of all such records. Absent his doing so, one could legitimately wonder whether some or all of the funding for such college attendance may have rested upon assertions of the foreign nationality of his adoptive father and his earl-childhood education in madrassas in Indonesia.
We should all be mindful of an important fact of reality in any debate-- making weak arguments diminishes a yet-unpersuaded listener to give proper credit to our strong arguments. Making weak arguments is self-defeating.
--KOOK
