Illegitimate

Scott Hardie | May 1, 2011
If anyone reading this is a "birther," then I sincerely apologize for the condescension to come.

I try to be a fair person, but I'm just no longer willing to give birthers the benefit of the doubt. When I would read one of their arguments online, I used to think that maybe the person was gullible or fashionable or misguided, just following along with a trend. Now I'm inclined to think that they're delusional. It's not just a case of confirmation bias; birthers honestly think documents say things they don't and laws say things they don't. For example, in the middle of this essay building on Trump's momentum, among the questionable claims is that "under Article II, Section I, Clause 5 of the United States Constitution... [o]ur founders determined that future presidents must be born to two parents who are both U.S. citizens." The specificity of the citation makes this a no-brainer to debunk: The text says no such thing, and even a loose interpretation of "natural born citizen" to mean "both to two citizen parents" is not consistent with court rulings throughout U.S. history. I never really paid much attention to birthers beyond the ridiculous headlines that flash by now and then, and now I guess I feel sorry for them, believing in things that are manifestly not true and yet believing so passionately.

However, I will grant the birthers two points:

1) The mainstream media really doesn't portray them objectively. Even when explaining that one in four Americans doubts Obama's birth story, and thus one-fourth of their readers, the lead sentence still says, "A quarter of all Americans incorrectly think President Obama was not born in the United States." Maybe it's better this way -- I for one think the even-handedness with which the media covers both belief and disbelief in evolution is at best unrealistic, and at worst damaging to our nation's (declining) scientific prowess -- but it's not fair, and the birthers are right about that.

2) The questioning of Obama's birth story is not in and of itself racist, despite arguments to the contrary. To believe that these conspiracy theories about Obama are unique to Obama is to ignore history: Many presidents have been called illegitimate for one reason or another, from Bush's debated victory over Gore, to Clinton's perjury and possibly other illegal activities, back and back throughout history. Obama isn't even the first president to be accused of being born outside of the country; Chester A. Arthur faced similar allegations that continue to this day. If Obama had been a white man with the exact same birth circumstances and life story, the volume might not be quite as loud on this controversy, but the same accusations of ineligibility for office would remain.

Right now in an alternate universe, President John McCain has just released his long-form birth certificate after having refused to publish it for years (just like here), due to the maelstrom of conspiracy theories surrounding his birth in Panama. Some people claim that he was brainwashed into Communism during his years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese and that he's secretly working for Asian interests. Others claim that his narrow, contested victory over the statistically more popular Obama in 2008 could only have been the product of cheating at the uppermost levels of the Republican party. And so the cycle repeats...