Obama, Natural Citizenship, & National Adoption: Part I
The bombing of the Boston Marathon by naturalized citizens, Russian brothers who became citizens on September 11, 2012 after living in America for many years, serves as a teachable moment to point out the thinking of those who wrote the presidential eligibility clause, as well as those who approved it.
Our Founding Fathers trusted naturalized citizens to not be anti-American bombers, traitors, or King George loyalists. They knew that if they were any of those things, then their true nature would not be kept secret unless they were spies, of which there were some. But few or none of those had lived in and among the Americans for 14 years, and were a mature 35 years of age – two qualities any naturalized citizen was required to possess in order to be trusted to serve as the Commander-in-Chief of the American Army and militia. But, even though the Founders gave them that opportunity by allowing their own generation of foreign-born Americans to become President, they knew that they had virtually no chance of actually being elected, so the risk of a monarch-loving traitor being elected President was essentially zero.
Reality hasn’t changed significantly in the two and a quarter centuries since then, and the nature of naturalized citizens is forever one that, in general, can’t be viewed as being naturally loyal to their country since their natural country was not America.
Thought should be given to the danger they potentially pose, and whether they should be allowed all of the rights of natural Americans (like buying all sorts of weapons and ammo). The problem with adopting such an attitude is that they are, in the eyes of the government, indistinguishable from natural Americans. And here is the reason why:
Life can be divided into two kinds of divisions: That which is Reality, and that which is Fiction. Fiction is an important part of all of our lives, and we would be very much impoverished without it (no movies, no TV dramas or comedies, no novels, no imaginative art, etc.), and so it is embraced as important, and valuable to the pursuit of happiness.
Fiction does not exist solely in the public realm, it exists also as an important element of the legal realm, being known as “a fiction of law”. A good example is that of the desire of the “morally upright”, (or uptight, depending on your perspective) to criminalize sexual behavior by minors.
That is done by first laying the foundation of it as always viewing the female as an unwilling victim, and then making the male (likely her 18-19 year old boyfriend) out to be an evil aggressive predator toward an innocent young girl (like his 16 year old girlfriend). Then lastly, you slap a criminal term on their … err, his behavior and call it something heinous like, say, rape! But, since it is not at all rape, you have to tweak it to distinguish it from real rape, and so you call it “Statutory Rape”. Viola! The doer of the dastardly deed can thereby be labeled as a criminal for following the overwhelming desire of nature. And it’s all made possible thanks to the convenience of a created fiction of law.
That’s a great example, but let’s focus on the subject at hand – the fiction of adoption as a metaphor for naturalization. The most desirable adoption is an early adoption. Adopting a baby at the beginning of its life helps to create the strongest bond between the parents and the child – a child which they already highly value.
In order to protect that bond, the government allows a fiction of law to transpire when it comes to the creation of its birth certificate. Instead of letting the facts be the facts, by law the Registrar of Vital Statistics is allowed to let the fiction be the facts, and thereby hide the truth about the real parents from the child, forever. The original birth certificate is placed under seal by court order and it is never again accessed by anyone related to the child, including the child as an adult either, and in its place a new “original” birth certificate is issued.
There are millions of Americans who do not know who their biological parents are, and can never know because those parents are being “protected” by a fiction of law, whether they want to be or not. But they aren’t the only ones; the adoptive parents do not want their growing child to be shaken by the unsettling, world-changing information of being an actual stranger to one’s parents and not their real child. (Disregard the fact that some parents are so bad that the children would be happy to know that they are not of the same stock.)
So with the fiction firmly established by law, life can proceed as it would normally for a natural child – a blood member of its family and true child of its mother and father.
That is how it works for adoption at the personal level, for individuals. But there is another kind of adoption, and it is adoption on the national level. It can also be an individual thing, or it can be a mass thing, as it was a few decades past when over 100,000 desperate and stateless boat people from Vietnam sought to escape from persecution for their crime of having worked to avoid enslavement by the socialist North.
They were slowly allowed to come to the United States and with their numbers being so great, it was decided that America, being their new and permanent home, needed to provide them membership in the nation, and so Congress did just that. It adopted them en mass into the American family by granting them U.S. citizenship – naturalizing them. Congress exercised that same authority when it turned all of the citizens of Puerto Rico and Guam into Americans.
Naturalization is also a fiction of law. By it, the government can pretend that natural-ized persons are natural citizens just like those born being citizens. After natural-ization, they are considered to be natural members of the American family and not adoptees. That is a good thing. Everyone knows that it’s like a dart to the heart when some bully or older sibling yells, “You’re adopted!” That implies that you are unnatural and therefore second class and an outsider by birth, rather than a natural insider.
So how does this relate to one Barack H. Obama II? It’s not related to his naturalization since he was never naturalized (that we know of, but we know hardly anything since all records are sealed, destroyed, missing, or counterfeit). Rather, it is related to the office to which he was elected, and whether or not he was actually ever eligible to hold it.
That question springs from the the requirement set forth in plain English in the United States Constitution: “No person, except a natural born citizen, [or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution] shall be eligible to the office of the President.” [brackets added]
Since Obama was not alive when the Constitution was adopted, he is required to be what all Presidents before him were (with one lying exception) – a natural born citizen. So does Obama meet the primary requirement of the Constitution? Or does he fail to meet it and therefore fall under the authority of the 20th Amendment by which Congress is to reject any President or Vice President that fails to qualify by the Constitution’s criteria?
That is a question that most intelligent people in the U.S. government know the answer to but are afraid to acknowledge. And that is because he manifestly does not quality since he is not a natural born citizen, and yet he is the President anyway because not one single person in all of public American life had the courage to state the obvious: The emperor has no constitutional clothing. The fix was in, and in big-time.
If he is not a natural born citizen, then what kind of citizen is he?
Americans can be divided into four different varieties, only three of which are acknowledged by the government (though not publicly). They are: natural born citizens, native-born citizens, and naturalized citizens. The forth unacknowledged type is presumptive citizens, i.e., citizens by policy.