Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Obama 'Birthers' could finally getting ignored

There are numerous people who are requesting proofs that President Obama was actually born in Hawaii. The state House Judiciary Committee heard that a bill permits government officials to ignore people who want the birth certificates. These "birthers" say that President Obama should be ineligible to be a president. If President obama was actually born outside of the United States then he doesn't meet a constitutional requirement for being president. Hawaii Health Director Dr. Chiyome Fukino says that there are vital records that prove Obama is a natural-born American citizen. Even with these vital records there are still many people who send emails to ask for verification of Obama's birth in Hawaii. There are people who believe this would be a bad rep for Obama by not responding to the requests. "Attorney Peter Fritz asked why the state would pass a law punishing repetitive requests for open records. Instead, the staet could simply say it would only answer each person's question once.

I believe it is pretty annoying how people would ask for President Obama's birth certificate proof more than once. It does take the state's time and resource to answer the questions that people have. I think Attorney Peter Fritz does have a good idea in answering people's questions, but just once and not multiple time.

2 comments:

Katherine Wayne said...

I think people really lack faith of our government officals. I agree that answering questions once is the best way possible to handle a situation like this. Besides that, I find it completely ridiculous that anybody would second guess that the President of the United States wasn't born in the country. I mean, if there was any evidence that he wasn't actually born in Hawaii, I'm pretty sure that he wouldn't be allowed to run in the first place. Also, people tend to assume because he is partially African American and he has a Muslim name that he really wasn't born in this country. People really need to get over stereotypes and misconceptions like that.

Francis Wang said...

Hawaii is definitely having to deal with an annoying issue, but I don't think their proposed solution is the best solution.

"If the measure passed, the state Office of Information Practices could declare an individual a "vexatious requester" and restrict rights to government records for two years."

Refusing to acknowledge new requests from people who have repeatedly asked for Obama's birth certificate seems reasonable, but the wording of the article seems to imply that access to information other than Obama's birth certificate would also be restricted, which seems like a rather odd response.