Obama and the "birthers"
This morning’s “on Point” made our Ottawa-area correspondent Lucy Martin mad. She grew up in Hawaii:
Hawaii, where I lived for 37 years, isn’t big. People talk. And the informal ‘coconut wireless’ was even more effective back in the early ’60s. There are still people alive today in Hawaii who ‘know the truth’ (as the conspiracy theorists like to say).
My Great-Aunt, Honolulu Realtor Lea Thropp, was once a high-rise neighbor of Madelyn Durham, Obama’s Grandmother. Durham was a distinguished, hard-working pioneer in a very conservative industry (banking). Not someone who would perpetrate a serious and longstanding fraud. (And why would anyone have any need to do so, back when the conspiracy would have had to be set into motion?)
My dear Aunt died a good while ago, so it’s not like I can use her as a secondary source. I’m just saying, Honolulu was a small town! There are plenty of ways to check this stuff out. And folks across Hawaii are well and truly satisfied that Obama was born on the island of Oahu, on Aug 4, 1961.
That means he was automatically a US citizen, by right of birth, and by right of his mother’s citizenship. (Place of birth and parental status are how I claim my U.S. citizenship, how about you?)
There are some some fairly tortured explanations out there about his father’s citizenship making Obama less than a full citizen. Or about being adopted by his Indonesian step-father, all of which strike me as irrelevant to Barack Obama’s rights and status under any interpretation of law: is there any doubt his mother was American?
Obama’s birth notices were printed at the time in two respected, long-standing local papers The Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star Bulletin. They look just like the clippings in our family scrap book announcing the arrival of my oldest brother, who was born at the same maternity hospital (Kapi’olani) a few years earlier.
Obama’s new-fangled State of Hawaii Department of Health birth certificate is identical to the birth certificate issued for my son, born in Honolulu in the 1990’s. If my elderly Mom or Dad went and asked for their Territory of Hawaii birth certificates today, what they’d get would look the same as Obama’s – that document is the current standard issue for anyone & everyone.
Two-term Republican Governor Linda Lingle has stated this is an unfounded issue.
It’s just plain insulting to keep suggesting there’s anything foreign, or suspect, about the citizenship of people born in Hawaii, as addressed by a former neighbor of mine in her Honolulu Advertiser blog:
Check the rumors, examine the hysteria and get real!
Several months ago I read some pop-psychology claim that people tend to make many decisions based on gut emotion, and then cast about for supposedly factual rationalizations that support that emotion-based preference.
That seems close to the truth in this case. Some people just don’t want Obama to be American, or to be eligible to serve as President.
He is. Get over it!
