I have been reading the Constitution of the United States of America since at least when I was in junior high school. I read MacBeth in high school and that was almost as long ago. I imagine that most of the writers of the Constitution had read Shakespeare’s story of the ambitious Scottish king whose story the play purports to tell.
I don’t know why I did not notice until this week an obvious possible constitutional conflict for some people who might wish to be our nation’s head of state.
Our constitution specifically mentions that the president be a “natural born citizen.” The crazy rightists who complain about Obama’s missing birth certificate won’t quit their railing about the president’s alleged foreign birth and the governmental officials in Hawaii who back in 1961 rigged the record so that a baby of mixed-race history could run for president when he grew up.
I don’t participate in that view of conspiracy. But just this week those words “natural born” have just hit me with a different light.
I am advancing the hypothesis that this rules out any person, male or female of any race or birthplace, who was born by Caesarian section.
But MacBeth made it clear that people exposed to British culture [such as the one we were seeking to replace here] knew the distinction between being born of woman and being plucked out of same.
I don’t know my history well enough to know if any of our previous presidents were born that way or not and question whether anybody would be able to document anybody’s status this way, certainly not without infringing upon somebody’s medical records, but this ought to give conspiracy people of another age something to work with.
I don’t know why I did not notice until this week an obvious possible constitutional conflict for some people who might wish to be our nation’s head of state.
Our constitution specifically mentions that the president be a “natural born citizen.” The crazy rightists who complain about Obama’s missing birth certificate won’t quit their railing about the president’s alleged foreign birth and the governmental officials in Hawaii who back in 1961 rigged the record so that a baby of mixed-race history could run for president when he grew up.
I don’t participate in that view of conspiracy. But just this week those words “natural born” have just hit me with a different light.
I am advancing the hypothesis that this rules out any person, male or female of any race or birthplace, who was born by Caesarian section.
But MacBeth made it clear that people exposed to British culture [such as the one we were seeking to replace here] knew the distinction between being born of woman and being plucked out of same.
I don’t know my history well enough to know if any of our previous presidents were born that way or not and question whether anybody would be able to document anybody’s status this way, certainly not without infringing upon somebody’s medical records, but this ought to give conspiracy people of another age something to work with.
