Obama & I are Ineligible to be President

I had thought that this debate had ended long ago and that the birthers had finally been driven back to their darkened conspiracy-ridden holes where they belong, but a conversation I had recently with an important person in my life made it abundantly clear that this is not the case. Otherwise normal people still remain convinced that our President is a foreign born Muslim, a belief that is troubling to me, not because people hold it, but rather because it remains so widespread. Apparently this myth still needs debunking, so here is an abundance of proof to put it to rest, at least among those who are acquainted with me, but first, how the eff did this come up?

I recently needed a copy of my birth certificate for completely unrelated reasons and, in a dinner conversation talking about it, made an off-hand joke about how I can't be a presidential candidate in Arizona. The bill there won't go anywhere but it's still unsettling that there is a group of people out there attempting to make it impossible for Americans born in many states other than Arizona to be put on the presidential ballot. As there is no witness or physician signature on my own birth certificate, though I assure you I was born in the United States and not in Kenya (unlike Luke Skywalker), I would not be able to appear as a candidate for President on an Arizona ballot if Republicans had their way. Shockingly (to me anyway) one of my dinner companions announced that Obama wasn't born in the United States, that the birth certificate listed on Obama's campaign website was a fake, the Governor of Hawaii had discovered that Obama was foreign born and covered it up, and that the President was even willing to call himself a Muslim. Until this point I had thought that birthers were all some sort of sufferers from a bizarre mental illness but this conversation shattered that notion, this is a person I respect and admire who had been taken in by this ridiculous myth. So here I am, back to attempting to beat back this lunacy once again.

The birth certificate that Obama's campaign put on the internet was indeed a verified certificate of birth, as verified by Politifact.com, FactCheck.org, and the Hawaii Department of Health just to name a few. You can see for yourself here or here. As Politifact noted, "If this document is forged, a U.S. senator and his presidential campaign have perpetrated a vast, long-term fraud. They have done it with conspiring officials at the Hawaii Department of Health, the Cook County (Ill.) Bureau of Vital Statistics, the Illinois Secretary of State's office, the Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois and many other government agencies."

Not only would they have had to conspire among all of those agencies, they would have had to travel back in time to notify two Hawaii newspapers of the fake Hawaiian birth of our future President. Either that or his parents would have to be part of a conspiracy to, for some reason, foresee that their son would one day be President and commit this fraud so that he may, over 40 years later, perpetrate their evil intentions to change the United States healthcare system and ...not raise taxes.

Any rational person can see that this whole idea is ridiculous, but the reasons behind it aren't so clear. There have been challenges to other Presidents' eligibility before but there's one looming reason why this particular President would have both his nationality and religion questioned, completely disregarding all available evidence to the contrary, and that is his race.