I’m 53 years young!
I find it hard to beleive that you have read through every civics textbook used in the last 100 years. Not all schools even had civics classes and I am sure many schools had old textbooks or none at all used for these classes. I learned about the Constitution in my US History classes and social studies classes. I attended a Catholic grade school for 7 years where I first discussed the Constitution, Bill of Right’s etc., a public middle school for one year, a public high school, and went to school at three different colleges part time at night to earn my degrees while I worked full time during the day. My entire education was in the state of Oregon, which was actually a far more conservative state then, than it is now. It was in these settings that I was taught that a “natural born citizen” was a child born in the U.S. to two parents who were U.S. Citizens.
We often did not use text books with regard to learning about the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, etc. We used transcriptions of the actual documents, and sometimes government pamphlets and copies of other historical documents. We didn’t have textbooks for many of our classes such as reading, writing, U.S. History and even math, since the teachers didn’t need textbooks to teach us those subjects, they simply knew the material. Homework assignments were usually typed up by the teachers and mimeographed off for us to take home and complete. In my earlier grades we had an atlas style book to use for social studies and even that was quite out of date, so we spent a lot of time at the county library doing research projects on a specific country and then made presentations ourselves to our classmates. We also had 50 students in each of my classes from first through seventh grade and we all learned quite well. The public schools had fewer students for most of my classes, however, there were still far more per class then than there is in most classes today.
Even in high school our text books were quite old and the teachers hardly used them except for math classes. It wasn’t until I got to college that I had textbooks that were fairly current and even then many of them were reprints of older text books.
We were taught not to beleive everything in a textbook because it might not be accurate or unbiased but to research things for ourselves and to use original sources whenever possible. When a person reads the “natural born citizen clause” after reading other texts like the Federalist papers, correspondence between our founders and other early historical documents it only makes sense that to be a “Natural born citizen” one would need to be born in the United States and be the child of two U.S. citizens.
At 34 and growing up in California I would suggest to you that you still have a lot to learn about life in more conservative parts of the country. I do not profess to know everything even at my age and I have almost 20 years on you. Learning is a continual process throughout a person’s life and few people ever stop learning.
Sorry, there's no way that is true. Either you have a faulty memory, or you ladies are lying. I don't know which.
No one, repeat, no one, prior to the Fall of 2008, claimed that natural born status required two citizen parents. Period.
Why did no know bring up the two-citizen parent requirement when Spiro Agnew was a vice presidential candidate? Or better yet, Michael Dukakis? Both men had at least one non-citizen parent.
Or better yet, how come not a single person raised the issue until AFTER Obama was elected? It was both well-known that he was running AND that his father wasn't a citizen. And yet, no one thought that might be a problem until after he was elected.
Sorry, ladies. Your story just doesn't pass the smell test.