BORN IN THE USA? Expert: Watch loyalty, not certificate of birth Cites Obama's references to Islam, denial of America's Christianity

Posted August 10, 2009
By Bob Unruh
© 2009 WorldNetDaily

A constitutional expert says the arguments over the definition of "natural born" citizen – a constitutional requirement for any occupant of the Oval Office – should be resolved by looking at how God instituted governments and where the person's loyalties lie.

Herb Titus, a one-time vice presidential candidate considered an expert on the U.S. Constitution, says it probably was up to the electors from the 50 states or members of Congress to make certain President Obama is a "natural born" U.S. citizen.

There is available when Congress votes on the acceptance of the Electoral College results an opportunity for those with questions to object, but that process was not used in the 2008 election.

Since then, a multitude of lawsuits have challenged Obama's eligibility to hold the highest office because of concerns over his place of birth and parentage.The U.S. Constitution requires a president to be a "natural born" citizen.

But Titus said probably the most important factor in the argument should be the president's loyalties.

"The reason for the concept of natural born citizens is so a country can't just throw you out willy-nilly," Titus told WND. "Your citizenship is in God's sovereign decision-making. You were born of certain parents.

"If you follow that kind of reasoning, Obama cannot be a natural-born citizen, even if he's born in Hawaii," because of his parents, he said. "One was Kenyan and one American."

More important, he told WND, is where Obama's loyalties lie.

"Did he write a book about his mother?" Titus asked.

The title of Obama's autobiographical book, "Dreams From My Father," referred to Barack Obama Sr., a Kenyan national subject to British colonial law at the time of the president's birth in 1961. The family split shortly thereafter, with Obama's father moving to Harvard for schooling and later to his Kenyan homeland.

Titus cited Deuteronomy 17, from the Bible, which includes instructions about judgment and leadership

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"Thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee, whom the Lord they God shall choose; one from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee; thou mayest not set a stranger over thee, which is not thy brother," says verse 15 in the King James.

The point was to avoid divided loyalty, Titus said. That's the same goal as the "natural born" clause in the Constitution, he said.

"What's in that is a prophecy," he said. "The king that's described is not a king like all other nations, but a king governed by God's law. 'You shall not have a king who is not from among your brethren.'

"Here's what I'm suggesting the Bible teaches: 'Don't get a king or a president like all the other nations that might have divided loyalty.' Find out who is loyal to the nation. Pay attention to the divisions of the parents on the basis of religion. The same with political identities."

Obama's family on his father's side is dedicated to Islam. In fact, his father married multiple wives under provisions of Islamic law. His mother was born in the Midwest and exposed to traditional Americana during her upbringing, especially when she lived in Kansas before the family's move to Hawaii.

And what of Obama's loyalties?

On a visit to the Muslim-dominated nation of Turkey, the president said, "If you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world."

Toby Harnden, columnist for the London Telegraph, commented:

"Candidate Obama … never used the name 'Hussein' and its use was frowned upon as a forbidden code for the nutty accusation that he was some kind of Islamic Manchurian candidate," Harnden wrote. "No more. To say Barack Hussein Obama … now appears to be the height of political correctness."

He wrote, "The Obama administration is embracing the new president's inner Muslim, as it were."

Harnden noted a "deputy national security adviser stated that Obama had 'experienced Islam on three continents … growing up in Indonesia, having a Muslim father – obviously Muslim Americans [are] a key part of Illinois and Chicago."

Obama also said in Turkey that Americans "do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation."



The "natural born" issue has been written about by Mario Apuzzo, a lawyer handling a legal challenge to Obama's presidency. Apuzzo's case alleges Congress failed to properly examine Obama's eligibility.

"Assuming that Obama was born in the United States, he was not only born a dual national of the United States and Great Britain, but at present he continues to be such. Some maintain that American law on citizenship cannot be subjected to any foreign law. But such an argument does not resolve the question of Obama's dual nationality, for each nation has the sovereign right to make its own citizenship laws and one nation cannot deny another nation that right," he wrote.

He said the British Nationality Act of 1948 provides that Obama is a British subject through his father's citizenship in Kenya.

"Whatever his father may have done regarding his Kenyan and/or British citizenship did not affect Obama’s British citizenship with which Obama was born. Hence, under the Kenyan Constitution, Obama presumably lost his Kenyan citizenship by not renouncing his U.S. (assuming he was born in the U.S.) and British citizenships, by not taking an oath of allegiance to Kenya, and by not registering his declaration to take up residence in Kenya. But under British law, he did not lose his British citizenship because he never renounced that citizenship."

Many have argued, Apuzzo wrote, that the framers of the Constitution did not intend for dual citizens with divided loyalties to be eligible for the presidency.

Multiple legal battles have been raging over access to the president's original long-form birth certificate, which presumably would answer questions about his birthplace, parents and other issues. But even releasing the document would not resolve the problem, some have argued, because of various laws in effect at the time he was born.

Hawaii at the time, for example, issued birth certificates to babies not born in the state. And besides the birth document, WND has reported that other documents still not released by Obama includes kindergarten records, Punahou school records, Occidental College records, Columbia University records, Columbia thesis, Harvard Law School records, Harvard Law Review articles, scholarly articles from the University of Chicago, passport, medical records, files from his years as an Illinois state senator, Illinois State Bar Association records, any baptism records and his adoption records.

Titus told WND that the conventional wisdom is that a natural born citizen is someone born within the geographic limits of the nation. But that's why he said it is necessary to look further, into loyalties and attitudes.

A French couple visiting Chicago, for example, would produce a "natural born" citizen if their baby was born during their travels, he noted.

The founding documents for the United States set out a framework for a nation by establishing "We, the people," Titus noted.

That's a political connection, since a multitude of nationalities, religions and races already were represented.

"If you extrapolate from that, at least one of the parents of a child would have to be a member of the political community, if not both," he said.

But when Obama was confronted by harsh criticism of the United States during a meeting of the Organization for American States, Titus noted, instead of defending its actions, the president said, "Well, I was only 5 years old then."

The questions go further than most people know, wrote Andrew McCarthy in National Review Online.

"The fact is that Obama's account of his background is increasingly revealed as a fabrication, not his life as lived; his utterances reflect the expediencies of the moment, not the truth. What is supposed to save the country from fraudulence of this sort is the media. Here, though, the establishment press is deep in Obama's tank … How many Americans know, for example, that as a sitting U.S. senator in 2006, Obama interfered in a Kenyan election, publicly ripping the incumbent government (a U.S. ally) for corruption while he was its guest and barnstorming with his preferred candidate: a Marxist now known to have made a secret agreement with Islamists to convert Kenya to Shariah law, and whose supporters, upon losing the election, committed murder and mayhem, displacing thousands of Kenyans and plunging their country into utter chaos?"

McCarthy, too, asserted the birth-certificate controversy is about Obama's honesty, "not where he was born," raising the issue of the president's loyalties.

"Jaws dropped when, once safely elected, he reversed course (again) and embraced his Islamic heritage," he wrote.

Harnden also jumped on the issue of the "Certification of Live Birth" released by Obama as proof of his U.S. citizenship, a document different from the "Birth Certificate."

"Regardless of why people may want to see the vault copy, what's been requested is a primary document that is materially more detailed than what Obama has thus far provided," he said.

Harnden said some people are pursuing such information to try to prove Obama is foreign.

But there are other reasons.

"We now know that [Obama's] life story is chock full of fiction. Typical and disturbing, to take just one example, is the entirely fabricated account in "Dreams From my Father" of Obama's first job after college," he wrote.

Harden quotes from Obama's book how he describes himself as a "financial writer," where he would, "coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders … catch my reflection in the elevator doors – see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand – and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry."

In reality, Harnden wrote, Obama was a "junior copyeditor."

"What's unnerving about this is that it is so gratuitous. It would have made no difference to anyone curious about Obama's life that he, like most of us, took a ho-hum entry-level job to establish himself. But Obama lies about the small things, the inconsequential things, just as he does about the important ones – depending on what he is trying to accomplish at any given time," he writes.

The fallout just raises more questions.

"It's now apparent, however, not only that he was raised as a Muslim while living for four years in the world’s most populous Islamic country, but that he very likely became a naturalized citizen of Indonesia," Harnden wrote.

"Thus Obama probably obtained Indonesian citizenship through his adoption by (his stepfather Lolo) Soetoro in Hawaii. That inference is bolstered by the 1980 divorce submission of Ann Dunham and Lolo Soetoro, filed in Hawaii state court. It said 'the parties' (Ann and Lolo) had a child (name not given) who was no longer a minor (Obama was 19 at the time). If Soetoro had not adopted Obama, there would have been no basis for the couple to refer to Obama as their child – he'd have been only Ann Dunham's child," Harnden pointed out.

Another constitutional scholar, Edwin Vieira, wrote just before the election of the "gravest constitutional crisis" because of uncertainties over Obama's eligibility.

"Obama's stubborn refusal to provide what he claims is 'his own' country with conclusive proof on that score compels the presumption that he knows, or at least strongly suspects, that no sufficient evidence in his favor exists. After all, he is not being pressed to solve a problem in quantum physics that is 'above his pay grade,' but only asked to provide the public with the original copy of some official record that establishes his citizenship," he wrote.

"If Obama is not 'a natural born Citizen' or has renounced such citizenship, he is simply not eligible for 'the office of president' (Article II, Section 1, Clause 4). …. For neither the voters, nor the electors, nor members of the House can change the constitutional requirement, even by unanimous vote."

"Perhaps most importantly, Congress can pass no law while a usurper pretends to occupy 'the office of president,' Vieira warned. "The Constitution provides that “[e]very bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a law, be presented to the President of the United States” (Article I, Section 7, Clause 2). Not to an usurper posturing as 'the president of the United States,' but to the true and rightful president."

Note: Members of the news media wishing to interview Jerome Corsi, Joseph Farah, Joe Kovacs, Chelsea Schilling, Les Kinsolving or Bob Unruh on this issue, please contact WND.