Apparently a bunch of very ill-informed people are filing lawsuits, claiming that Mr. Obama wasn't born in the USA.
What's amazing to me about this entire article is that nowhere in it does it address the actual constitutional issue - that a candidate for president be a "natural born citizen." That means that they were a citizen at birth, rather than naturalized later. Regardless of whether Mr. Obama was born in Kenya or Hawaii, he is a "natural born citizen."
Now, he has provided his birth certificate, and that's a legal document, so there's really no case to begin with. But it bugs me that so much fuss would be made over a non-issue. As it happens, every president so far has been born in the USA, a fact about which I was apparently mistaken. However, the constitution does not require this - merely that they be a US citizen on the day of their birth.
I, for example, was born in Kenya, but I am a "natural born citizen." Not that I'd be crazy enough to want to be president. But the fact that the question even arises is troubling. Are military kids, born overseas, automatically ineligible? The constitution says that they're not. And are we really so terrified of foreign contamination that someone born to USA citizens on foreign soil is automatically suspect in some way?
Xenophobes really, really irritate me.
I always found it really odd that you had to be a US citizen from birth anyway. I guess it ties into the irrational fear of the English taking over again, but I fail to see why you wouldn't want to elect the best person for the job, regardless of where they were born.
Requiring them to become a citizen before taking office makes sense, but even most monarchies are happy for naturalized folk to become royalty. The Danish Princess Mary for example, who was originally an Aussie with no Danish ties at all.
First: These are people who don't want to see Barack Obama as president, and they are filing these lawsuits to try to accomplish that. That doesn't have anything to do with xenophobia. "Non-natural born citizen" is the method, not the purpose. There was a similar effort aimed at John McCain early in his candicacy, because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone (to American parents). That little hullabaloo died fairly quickly, but I imagine it would have flared up again had he won the national race.
Second: The issue certainly seems to be up in the air, since the qualification for president is really the only time that the term "natural-born citizen" is mentined in the Constitution. So while it comes up every so often, it has never been firmly decided, one way or the other. Foreign-born children of citizen parents are definitely citizens; whether they are "natural-born citizens" or simply "citizens" seems to still be in question. Wikipedia has a lengthy article on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-born_citizen
McCain was born in Panama. Yes it was brought up early like the Obama issue was. They were both debunked early. This seems to be another irritating ploy on the uneducated and uninformed to sway votes.
I read some articles about how the issue is that he would get his father's citizenship (Kenyan). That makes no sense, though - if he was born in Hawaii (which I believe he was), then he would be a US citizen anyway, regardless of his parents' citizenship. If he was born out of the US, having one parent as a US citizen (with the proviso of a physical presence test which can end up being a problem if the US citizen parent has spent a significant part of his or her life overseas) guarantees US citizenship. I read in one place that some say his citizenship was changed to Indonesian when he was living there, but I've seen no evidence presented to support that. If that were the case, he would have needed a visa to travel to the US when he returned for school, and all of these things leave a paper trail. I also read an interesting article on Salon.com about conspiracy theorists wrt this controversy.
(And yes, I do have plenty of other things to do other than reading all these articles!)