Birther Bullshit

[Fred the Red Shirt]

Nonsense.

I challenge the ‘birthers’ to produce ANY so-called ‘short form’ birth
certificate that was issued prior to the era of electronic record
keeping.

Prior to electronic record keeping, there were no ‘short forms’. When
a person requested a copy of their birth certificate they got a
photostatic copy of the original.

When I was searching for in-laws I learned a bit about birth
certificates from the wonderfully helpful people who do adoption
searches and genealogy.

Regarding ‘long form’ vs ‘short form’:

A ‘long form’ is filled in shortly after birth and kept on file. The
ORIGINAL is never released, else there would be nothing left on file.
Most states have entered some of the information from the ‘long form’
into their digital records which are used to generate the so called
‘short form’.

I repeat: prior to electronic record keeping, there were no ‘short
forms’.

In those states that have a ‘short form’ EVERYONE who requests a birth
certificate gets a ‘short form’. The states have done this to cut
costs and interfere with adoption searches. (The ‘short form’
typically will not have various indicia of adoption, like dates filed
or amended.)

In some states a photostatic copy of the original ‘long form’ can
still be obtained at extra cost by special request.
I don’t know if Hawaii permits that.

The function of any birth certificate is to establish, for legal
purposes, a person’s date and place of birth, and the identities of
that person’s parents. The only circumstance I have ever heard of,
from a reliable source, under which some of that information may be a
legal fiction, is adoption.

Prior to electronic record keeping, the adopted was issued a second
(e.g. amended) ‘long form’ birth certificate, with the name(s) of the
adopted parents substituted for the birth parents. (Amusingly, when a
single man adopted, the mother’s name on the amended birth certificate
was stated as ‘unknown’.)