Hawaiian State Senator Seeks to Make It Legal to Pretend Birthers Don't Exist
Hawaii has a problem. And, no, I'm not referring to the cancellation of Filipino WBO Welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao's upcoming singing engagement in Waikiki. I'm talking about an equally distressing but different problem.
Apparently, the state's department of health simply cannot keep up with the rising tide of requests from the mainland for… (wait for it)… (just a little bit longer now)… copies of the president's birth certificate…
A spokesperson says the health department, which has laid off four people in recent budget cuts, gets 40 to 50 requests each month for a copy of the president's birth certificate and by law is required to respond to each within 10 days. All of them are from the mainland — particularly Arizona, South Carolina and Florida, says spokeswoman Janice Okubo.
"They're spurred on by these 'birther' blogs who direct them to bombard the Health Department even though they have no legitimate right to the information," she says. "They've been misled to believe that the state of Hawaii gives out birth information to anyone who requests it, but really our law protects birth information. We're entrusted with protecting people's vital records. To open them up would mean opening them up to identity theft and other types of concerns."
40 or 50 a month? That's, well, quite frankly not nearly as many as I would have thought. I'm guessing the lion's share of these requests are being sent to Hawaii, Indonesia. Or are being sealed, stamped and then dropped into a toaster oven.
Okay, so what do you if you're a Hawaiian legislator looking to protect your already overtaxed state workers from irrational conspiracy theorists who think that you're part of a dystopic machine bent on withholding information from the public?
Obviously, you create a law that will make it legal to hide information from people who want it the most…
A Hawaii Democratic state senator has introduced two bills that he hopes will put an end to the "birther" debate that has overwhelmed the state Department of Health with requests for Barack Obama's birth certificate…
One would open up state birth records under strict conditions to people who currently have no legitimate right to see them and the other would permit government officials to ignore people who won't give up seeking them.
Well, sounds like they've got that one under control. No way that can blow up in their faces.
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* Would anyone have even gotten it if I'd gone with "Birther, Don't Ya Come Around Here Anymore"? Anyone?
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From Arizona, eh?
Why is it that birthers can ignore this bit of federal law when considering the meaning of "natural born citizen":
"If one parent is a US citizen and the other parent is not, the child is a citizen if (1) the US citizen parent has been "physically present"[6] in the US before the child's birth for a total period of at least five years, and (2) at least two of those five years were after the US citizen parent's fourteenth birthday."
But they have no problem ignoring that McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone and is only an American citizen based upon a similar federal law:
"If both parents are US citizens, the child is a citizen if either of the parents has ever lived in the US prior to the child's birth"
These are both forms of Jus sanguinis citizenship. If Obama is questionable under "Natural Born Citizen" then McCain is equally questionable.
Furthermore, if Obama's election were to be successfully contested and overturned, we would have President Biden, not President McCain. Birthers, is that really what you want?