SETIsLady wrote: I can't remember in my life a President ever being asked to show his birth certificate. If I am wrong please correct me.
There are only two reasons that its happening now, it’s because he is black or because of his name, imo.
Hmm...this repeated question has been nagging me...what did it remind me of? Oh yeah! The last presidential election!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23415028/ns/nightly_news/McCain's citizenship called into question
Candidate, born in Panama Canal Zone, may not qualify as 'natural born'
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and his advisers are doing their best to brush aside questions — raised in the liberal blogosphere — about whether he is qualified under the Constitution to be president. But many legal scholars and government lawyers say it's a serious question with no clear answer.
The problem arises from a phrase in the Constitution setting out who is eligible to be president. Article II, which also specifies that a person must be at least 35 years old, says "No person except a natural born Citizen" can be president.
Sen. McCain is undoubtedly a citizen. He was born on Aug. 29, 1936, in the Panama Canal Zone, and Congress has specifically provided that anyone born there of U.S. parents, as he was, is a citizen. Indeed, the general rule is that anyone born of U.S. parents outside the United States is a citizen.
But is John McCain a natural born citizen? The Constitution does not define the term further, and legal scholars say the notes of the Constitution's drafters shed little light on what they meant. It seems clear only that the founders wanted to make certain that whoever was president would be loyal to the U.S. alone and not to some other country. But the term "natural born citizen," many scholars say, was not in common use at the time the Constitution was written.
Sen. McCain's supporters draw some comfort from a law passed in 1790 by the first Congress. It provided that the children of US citizens born outside the US "shall be considered as natural born citizens." The law is no longer in effect, but it provides some guidance on what the founders had in mind at the time of the Constitution.
And some legal experts find it hard to believe the founders would have considered their own children, if born overseas, to be ineligible for the presidency.
"If John and Abigail Adams were sent to France on a diplomatic mission, I find it inconceivable that they would have thought their children were not natural born citizens," said Professor John Parry of Lewis and Clark Law School.
Issue has come up before
This issue has been raised before in the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater, born in Arizona territory not the United States, and George Romney, born in Mexico. But it was never resolved.