[LINK] "Hawaii Limits Requests for Obama’s Birth Records"

[rfmcdonald]

It's no secret that racism has played a substantial role in the reaction of many Americans to the election of President Obama. Can a man like Obama, African-American (at least according to the one-drop rule prevailing in North America), with a Kenyan father and perhaps signfiicantly a white mother (and even more significantly a Muslim father), be a viable candidate for president? Is he--cue ominous an American at all? Perhaps 15% of the total population believes so, making any number of ridiculous claims and contortions of logic to suggest that the multiply-verified Barack Obama birth certificate is a fake, that--as part of a grand plot--he's actually not an American citizen by birth and therefore unqualified for the position of American president. Fortunately, the Hawaiian state government has decided that responding to the birthers isn't worth its energies.

The conspiracy theorists who cling to the false belief that President Obama was born outside the United States outrage many Democrats and embarrass many Republicans. But to a group of state workers who toil away in a long building across from the Capitol, they represent something else: a headache and a waste of time.

The theorists, known as “birthers,” have deluged the state Health Department here with so many demands for information about the president’s birth in Hawaii that Gov. Linda Lingle, a Republican, signed a law this week allowing state agencies to ignore repeated requests from people who have had a request answered in the last year.

It comes none too soon for Health Department workers, who have been inundated with so many requests for the president’s birth records that a printout of the e-mail messages they have received on the topic through March stands some 13 inches high. Each one required a response, and many required consultations with state lawyers.

[. . .]

By Hawaiian law, birth records can only be released to people with “a direct and tangible” interest in them — a person born in the state, say, or certain relatives or their estates. So when questions about Mr. Obama’s birth first surfaced during the 2008 presidential election, his campaign posted a copy of his “certification of live birth” on a Web site; it states that Barack Hussein Obama II was born in Honolulu on Aug. 4, 1961, at 7:24 p.m.

When questions continued to pour in, the state’s health director, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, announced that she had seen the original records and that they showed that Mr. Obama was “born in Hawaii and is a natural born American citizen.”

When the questions persisted, the department created a Web page titled “Frequently Asked Questions About Vital Records of President Barack Hussein Obama II.” It did little to assuage the doubters.

Some of the e-mail messages were vulgar, others hostile. Health department workers found themselves vilified on blogs. “Your name will be synonymous with Benedict Arnold by the time this is done,” reads one that is signed, “an American natural-born citizen.”