Posted: June 16, 2009 BY JOSEPH FARAH OF "WND"
1:00 am Eastern
© 2009
Since I began my quixotic campaign to uncover Barack Obama's birth certificate, many have asked me about the president's possible motives for hiding it with such tenacity and diligence.
I think there are many plausible motives:
- Perhaps something in that birth certificate, if it indeed exists, would contradict assertions Obama has made about his life's story. These might even involve his true parental heritage. Without a real birth certificate, no one really knows who his parents were. So it is ridiculous even to speculate about whether citizenship could be conferred upon him by his mother, when we don't know for sure who his mother is.
- Perhaps it reveals a foreign birth, as Hawaii allowed for in 1961 while still issuing the "certification of live birth" we have seen posted on his website.
- Or perhaps it will show just what Obama has claimed all along – a birth in Hawaii to two officially non-citizen parents, for the purpose of establishing "natural born citizenship" under the Constitution.
What do I mean by that last possibility?
Well, as you know, in 2008, the Senate of the United States held hearings to determine if one of the presidential candidates fulfilled the requirement of being a "natural born citizen." It wasn't Barack Obama. It was John McCain, who was born on a U.S. military base overseas to two U.S. citizens.
On April 10 of last year, two senators, both Democrats, Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Claire McCaskill of Missouri, introduced a resolution into upper house expressing a sense of the Senate that McCain was indeed a "natural born citizen."
It's interesting what Leahy had to say on the subject: "Because he was born to American citizens (emphasis added), there is no doubt in my mind that Senator McCain is a natural born citizen. I expect that this will be a unanimous resolution of the U.S. Senate."
And, indeed it was. It was also, interestingly, the only such hearing held by the Congress on the subject of "natural born citizenship" and its application to the 2008 presidential race. Why was that interesting? Because everyone involved in this process knew – or should have known – that the life story told by Barack Obama would raise far more doubts about his eligibility than McCain's.
Notice Leahy did not say one parent citizen would qualify a child for "natural born citizenship." He indicted it would take two to tango.
He did so again at a Judiciary Committee hearing April 3, when he asked then-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, a former federal judge, if he had any doubts about McCain's eligibility to serve as president.
"My assumption and my understanding is that if you are born of American parents, you are naturally a natural-born American citizen," Chertoff responded – again underlining the fact that both parents would need to be citizens.
And what did Leahy say to that? "That is mine, too."
By the way, Obama voted for this resolution, so he obviously agrees with the definition of what constitutes a "natural born citizen" – the offspring of two U.S. citizens.
Now, I don't know who Barack Obama's parents are, because I have never seen his birth certificate. All I've seen is a facsimile of a "certification of live birth" on the Internet. That document, even if genuine, proves nothing about Obama's birth in Hawaii or who his parents were. Hawaii had a very slipshod practice in 1961 of issuing these documents to babies born outside the country and listing parents who may not have been the parents at all.
But I do know who Barack Obama claims his parents were. According to him, neither one of them was an American citizen able to confer natural born citizenship on a child. One, Barack Obama Sr., was a foreign national from Kenya, and the other, Stanley Ann Dunham, was too young to have qualified under the law for bestowing that privilege on her son, even if the father had been a citizen and even in the unlikely event Obama was actually born in Hawaii!
So, if we are to take Obama at his word, he is not a natural born citizen and not eligible to serve as president.
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