According to the September issue of The Atlantic, one in four Americans believe that President Obama is not a “natural born citizen” of the United States, while half of all Republicans believe this. Given the latest political identification as indicated by the Rasmussen Report of June 2012, and the number of registered voters in the United States, that means that even twenty percent of Democrats and independents hold to this belief, still a considerable number.
The U.S. Constitution only specifies that, to be President, a person must be a “natural born citizen” of the United States, but does not define that term. Over the time since the Constitution was adopted, the courts have defined “natural-born citizen as a person who was born “in” the United States and under its jurisdiction, even those born to alien parents; or was born abroad to U.S. citizen-parents, either in the United States or elsewhere; or by being born in other situations meeting legal requirements for U.S. citizenship at birth.
At least three court suits have been filed on the question of Obama’s citizenship, all in different states, and the determinations in all cases have affirmed that he is a “natural-born” citizen. He was, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, born in a U.S. state of an American citizen.
So why do so many people, Republicans, in particular, believe he isn’t a “natural-born” citizen?
Yes, his mother divorced his father and then married an Indonesian and moved to Indonesia for a time, but the courts have previously ruled in other cases that similar acts, including the case of a woman born in the United States [with only her mother as a U.S. citizen, as was the case with Obama] who lived in a foreign country from the age of three until she was twenty-one was still a natural born citizen.
And why do so many Americans believe that he is a Muslim, when the man has attended Christian churches for so many years?
Or are these convenient beliefs merely a cover for the fact that Obama is black, and many voters, obviously including a significant proportion of Republicans, simply don’t want to admit publicly that they don’t like and don’t want a black President? Instead, they claim that his mother was too young when she married his father [using convoluted legal rhetoric to claim that because she was so young, the rules for a child being a citizen when only one parent is a citizen don’t apply, that is, if Obama didn’t happen to have been born in a U.S. state, ignoring the fact that he was] or that his birth certificate was forged, or that he was really born in Kenya.
It’s one thing to oppose a politician for what he stands for; it’s another to invent reasons to oppose him to avoid facing personal prejudices… and it’s a shame so many Americans have to go to such lengths to avoid admitting those prejudices. And it certainly doesn’t speak well of the United States that so many Americans accept such arguments as having any validity at all.