Natural Born Citizen?
On April 27, 20011 the White House released President Obama's long form birth certificate documenting the fact that he was born in the United States. However, this will not end the controversy over whether the President is a “natural born citizen” within the meaning of the Constitution and is therefore eligible to be president. The issue all along has been the conscious or subconscious inability of many to accept the fact that the Unites States elected an African-American president.
Nobody seemed to care that John McCain was born in 1936 in the Republic of Panama. True he was born in what was then considered the United States Panama Canal Zone, but the territory was never sovereign territory of the United States. The 1903 treaty between the US and the Republic of Panama creating the Panama Canal Zone did not cede territory to the US, it only granted certain perpetual rights under what was basically a lease. The 1936 General Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation signed by President Franklin Roosevelt relinquished some of those US rights a mere six months before McCain's birth. Clearly not all individuals born in United States territories are automatically US citizens, just ask the millions of people who were born in the Philippines while it was a US territory.
When Mitt Romney’s father George Romney ran for president in 1968, nobody seemed to care that he was born in Mexico. The media just assumed that because his parents were allegedly US citizens he was too. The media never really questioned the possibility that Romney’s ancestors, who voluntarily left the Utah territory before Utah became a state in 1896, may not have been citizens within the meaning of the Fourteen Amendment. And if they were citizens at one point, they may have relinquished their citizenship rights when they left the country. If they retained their citizenship there may be some “illegal immigrants” from Mexico whose ancestors were born in the Utah territory (or some other US territory) who left before such territory became a state. Are they really citizens with the same right to run for president as George and Mitt Romney if they now decide to come to the US because of the violence in Mexico? That’s why the Romney family fled Mexico in July 1912 and moved to the United States.
Had the media done its job then and now, perhaps they would have concluded that Mitt Romney’s father,
George Romney, was the only major presidential candidate in recent history who was not a “natural born citizen” with the meaning the Constitution. But that would require them to spend a few minutes researching Romney family history starting at this site and the reason Romney’s ancestors and other Mormon’s left the Utah territory. Instead many in the media unwittingly promulgated America’s sad history in dealing with the citizenship of African-Americans.
Maybe that’s because from the founding of our country until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of April 9, 1866, African-Americans were not considered citizens under federal, state and common law. The Fourteen Amendment enshrined portions of this act in the Constitution to ensure that no future Congress could strip citizenship from freed-slaves. The Fourteen Amendment was also meant to overturn the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford which had legitimized America’s racist citizenship practices. When Reconstruction ended in 1877, states, starting with those in the former confederacy, began to systematically strip away the rights of former slaves through a system referred to as Jim Crow. African-Americans were citizens in name only while rights afforded other Americans (like the right to vote, to own property, to work, to attend public schools, to marry, to a have fair trial conducted with a jury of peers, etc.) were systematically restricted or eliminated. Many of these rights were not restored until as late as 1967 when the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia struck down Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, ending all race based restrictions on marriage in the United States.
So why are we treating Barack Obama as something other than a “natural born citizen” in 2011? Have we entered into an era of new Jim Crow? If the media would do its job perhaps they and others would realize that beginning around the time of the Loving decision, when other Civil Rights Laws were being enacted (like the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 196
Barry Goldwater initiated the Law and Order strategy to appeal to conservatives and a few years later Richard Nixon initiated the so-called southern strategy to appeal to white voters in the South. These two strategies have culminated in a new Jim Crow that once again attempts to demonize African-Americans and strip away citizenship rights by selective interpretation and enforcement of the law. But we would not want the media to actually have to read an entire book on this subject, The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, because that might take time away from quoting a rich circus-clown like Donald Trump. He, like Bozo before him, is fun to watch on TV.
If the media would do its job they might even discover that Barry Goldwater was born a Jew and may not be a “natural born citizen” since he was not born in any state. So now that we’ve seen the birth certificate do people think or even care that Barry Obama was born a Muslim in Kenya? This country still seems to discriminate more against African-Americans than Jews or Mormons. Even Native American’s get a pass on being natural born citizens, although they too like Blacks, Jews and Mormons, have suffered miserably when it comes to many other rights.
Charles Curtis, the 31st Vice-President of the United States under Herbert Hoover, was a Native-American born on the Kaw reservation. His birthplace may not have been “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States within the meaning of the Fourteen Amendment’s definition of citizenship. Let’s not forget that under the 25th Amendment the Vice-President must meet the same requirements as the President in order to assume the Vice-Presidency.
Researching this issue too seems to be more than the media (or rich Bozoes) can handle so let’s end here. And let’s end all the birth certificate foolishness in the press and in the state legislatures. If a state like Louisiana does manage to exclude President Obama from the ballot (like its Governor Bobby Jindal would like to do) it would not be the first time a sitting President was not on a state ballot for a general election. George Wallace managed to exclude Lyndon Johnson from the Alabama ballot in 1964 presidential election because Wallace opposed segregation and the Democratic Party. Strom Thurmond did the same thing in the 1948 presidential election, incensed that President Harry Truman would have the audacity to desegregated the military.
What’s Bobby’s excuse? Maybe he needs to look in the mirror more often. Maybe we all do. Maybe one day racism and religious discrimination will end. Or maybe as we become a majory-minority nation people like Pat Buchanon and other Sons of the Confedercay will keep up the good fight.
http://naturalborncitizen.com/
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