barack obama birth certificate

barack obama birth certificate

Birth Certificate

Claim: Barack Obama has refused to make his birth certificate available for examination because it contains damaging information about him.

Status: False.

Example: [Collected via e-mail, June 2008]

I read that Obama will not release his birth certificate. Have heard rumors it's because he is listed as white. Or that because he isn't a U.S. born citizen.

Origins: In the first half of 2008, a number of rumors swirling around about presidential candidate Barack Obama coalesced in the claim that he "refused to produce his birth certificate" (as if that were a typical expectation of presidential candidates) because doing so would demonstrate some or all of those rumors to be true: that Barack Obama was "not African," that he was a Muslim with a middle name of Mohammed, that he wasn't born in the United States at all (and thus didn't qualify as a native-born citizen), etc.

In any event the rumormongers were likely to be disappointed. Information about religion and race, when it was collected for birth certificates, simply reflected
whatever the parents identified themselves to be; those values weren't officially assigned to the newborn children as immutable labels. And of course, no infant has any control over whatever names his parents choose for him.

As things turned out, when the Obama campaign made a copy of his Certification of Live Birth from the State of Hawaii available on the Internet in June 2008, it validated none of those rumors: The certificate shows his full name to be "Barack Hussein Obama II," it lists his father's race as "African" and his mother's as "Caucasian," it contains no information about religion, and it reports his birthplace as being Honolulu, Hawaii.

A number of self-proclaimed experts immediately seized the opportunity to pronounce the certificate a forgery (even though none of them had actually seen the original, just a scanned image of it), picking on such specious details as minor variations from other Hawaii-issued certificates and the lack of an embossed seal and signature. (Some forgery claimants even maintained that the certificate was actually an altered version of one issued to Barack Obama's half-sister, Maya.) Aside from the inherent absurdity of such claims (i.e., that a major party presidential nominee would risk his entire candidacy on a fraud that could be uncovered simply by a check of state health records), the supposedly incriminating details don't pan out: the certificate is consistent with others issued in the same time and place, and the embossed seal and signature don't show through very well on the scanned front image made available on the Internet because they were applied to the back of the original document, not the front.

In August 2008, Philadelphia attorney Philip Berg included claims of a forged certificate (among other rumors) as the basis for a suit in U.S. District Court challenging Barack Obama's eligibility for the presidency on the grounds that Obama was actually born in Kenya (not Hawaii) and/or subsequently gave up his U.S. citizenship and thus does not qualify as a native-born citizen of the U.S.