The birthers return (ugh!)

A good friend forwarded an email he received from his cousin claiming that President Obama wasn’t born in the US and urging “patriotic Americans” to circulate it to everyone they know. Here’s the response I sent him. Feel free to copy it in whole or in part if you get similar emails.

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This is a notorious Internet scam that’s more than two years old. Snopes.com describes it as “FALSE.” Or you can check out “Urban Legends,” which also describes this as an “email hoax” that’s been circulating since “April 2009″ and that’s “False.” Want more? Go to Factcheck.org, which in 2009 said “This chain e-mail is a transparent April Fools’ Day hoax. It fabricates an AP news story about an nonexistent group, and makes false claims about Obama and the Fulbright program.”

Since 2009, the Supreme Court has denied the efforts of the “birthers” to question President Obama’s citizenship. The President has produced his “long form” birth certificate (he had previously produced the birth certificate that everyone in Hawaii uses). Even Donald Trump has admitted that there’s nothing to this. But racists in Georgia and the other former Confederate states continue to believe lies like this because they can’t accept a black President.

The people behind this lie claim they are “patriotic Americans.” They’re not. These are the same people who still think the South was right to secede. (How much more disloyal and unpatriotic can a person be?) They still refuse to accept the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the US Constitution, which they claim to follow. They fought (and still fight) against integration, refusing to honor laws passed by our democratically elected Congress. They circulate lies about the duly elected President of the United States. And they refuse to accept the separation of church and state, which the Founding Fathers put into the First Amendment. In my opinion, they are traitors to the United States. President Obama is a better American than they’ll ever be.

Please pass this on to your cousin. If he has any integrity, he’ll forward it to every person he sent the email to with an apology for circulating lies. The next time you or your cousin gets a suspicious email like this, check it out before passing it on.