Birth Certificates for Dummies

[lds]

Donald Trump has been on some news-talk shows lately trying to bring credibility to the birther movement. Most of what he's said has been rather obviously and stupidly wrong, but he's garnering so much attention from the sensationalist media that it needs to be squashed right here and now

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[lds]

Oh no! Not radiata_prime! I use some of the topics you write about when debating with the fiscally irresponsible. Please, I beg you not to sacrifice your credibility on this particular Mount Moriah.

I'm impressed that factcheck.org holds up a "high resolution" "copy" of a certificate PRINTED WITH A LASER PRINTER, which it says *right on the certificate itself* as the original birth certificate.

This is the sort of thing that makes any corporate wage-earners shake our heads and cluck our tongues. Having received payroll checks processed by third-party processing companies, we've seen this exact same situation described in exactly the same words: it's written on our paychecks! Yes the paper can be forged. Yes the signature is machine-reproduced, rather than written by the (no doubt tired) hand of a finance clerk. Yes it's printed by a laser printer. But it says "original" on it too, because it's not a photocopy of an official document; it is the official document despite having been mass-produced.

Why is that check good when we take it to the bank? Because that document represents an entry in the bank's database that says the company has the funds to pay it. Similarly, the database in Hawaii is what holds the information about whether Obama was born there or not; the paper is just a "formal confirmation" of that truth. (See definitions section of the top-level post.)

So where did that record in the Hawaii database come from?


As the top Hawaiian official in charge of state health records in 2008, when the issue of Obama's birth first arose, Fukino said she thought she had put the matter to rest... The original so-called "long form" birth certificate-described by Hawaiian officials as a "record of live birth"-absolutely exists, located in a bound volume in a file cabinet on the first floor of the state Department of Health. Fukimo said she has personally inspected it-twice. The first time was in late October 2008, during the closing days of the presidential campaign, when the communications director for the state's then Republican governor, Linda Lingle (who appointed Fukino) asked if she could make a public statement in response to claims then circulating on the Internet that Obama was actually born in Kenya.

Before she would do so, Fukino said, she wanted to inspect the files-and did so, taking with her the state official in charge of vital records. She found the original birth record, properly numbered, half typed and half handwritten, and signed by the doctor who delivered Obama, located in the files. She then put out a public statement asserting to the document's validity. She later put out another public statement in July 2009-after reviewing the original birth record a second time...