Citizenship Of Eleven Representatives in Question?
You can have quite a bit of fun if you choose to indulge in the easy kind of conspiratorial thinking used by people who believe that Barack Obama is concealing that he was secretly born in Kenya, or in Communist Russia, or on the Moon. Among these people are eleven members of Congress who have signed their names to H.R. 1503 – a bill that would require all presidential candidates to provide copies of their birth certificates to prove that they are eligible to run for President.
The insinuation is that any politicians who have not provided a copy of their birth certificates to be viewed publicly can be rightly suspected of being secret foreigners, come to the United States to infiltrate our government. That is, after all, the contention of the “birther” movement, the group that H.R. 1503 was written for. The legislation is a political attack against Barack Obama, who is alleged by conspiracy theorists to be a secret Muslim spy whose Hawaiian birth certificate was faked years ago, because somehow, Obama’s handlers just knew he would be elected President.
U.S. Representative Bill Posey wrote the legislation, and has been joined by the following ten cosponsors:
Marsha Blackburn
Dan Burton
John Campbell
John Carter
John Culberson
Louie Gohmert
Bob Goodlatte
Kenny Marchant
Randy Neugebauer
Ted Poe
If these 11 members of Congress applied their conspiratorial standards of suspicion to themselves, they wouldn’t fare very well. After all, none of these members of Congress supplied their own birth certificates before running for public office. Furthermore, the legislation supported by these politicians only applies to presidential candidates, and not to congressional candidates? Why? What are they trying to hide? Are they all perhaps part of a secret Argentinian spy network, having been born in Tierra del Fuego and sent here secretly to conduct terrorist operations?
Of course, I don’t think that any of that is true, but the loose standards of logic employed by the birthers, and their enablers in Congress, could lead to the creation of such a conspiracy theory, if I were inclined to idle speculation.
