Claim: A Certification of Live Birth document provided by the Obama campaign is a forgery.
 | 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 records" 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 records, 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. Those who have actually touched and
examined the original certificate have verified and documented that it bears all the elements of a valid certificate of live birth.
A birth announcement for Barack
Obama Jr. was also published in the
Honolulu Advertiser on
13 August 1961, reporting a
4 August 1961 birth date for the child of Mr. and Mrs. Barack Obama:
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. In October 2008 a federal judge
dismissed the complaint:
In a 34-page memorandum and opinion, the judge said Berg's allegations of harm were "too vague and too attenuated" to confer standing on him or any other voters.
Surrick ruled that Berg's attempts to use certain laws to gain standing to pursue his claim that Obama was not a natural-born citizen were "frivolous and not worthy of discussion."
The judge also said the harm Berg alleged did "not constitute an injury in fact" and Berg's arguments to the contrary "ventured into the unreasonable."
(Contrary to various e-mails, Barack Obama has not "been ordered to produce his birth certificate by
December 1"; that is simply the response date set for one of the several related filings still working its way through the U.S. court system.)
Also in October 2008, Hawaiian officials reported that they had personally verified the existence of Barack Obama's original birth certificate:
State officials say there's no doubt Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.
Health Department Director Dr. Chiyome Fukino says she and the registrar of vital statistics, Alvin Onaka, have personally verified that the health department holds Obama's original birth certificate.
Fukino says that no state official, including Gov. Linda Lingle, ever instructed that Obama's certificate be handled differently from any other.
She says state law bars release of a certified birth certificate to anyone who does not have a tangible interest in it.
Last updated: 15 November 2008
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