Are you kidding me? Men and women were killed over the issue. Our Founding Fathers were well aware of the facts of life, including how and by whom children were conceived.
Legal precedent is that any child born during a legal marriage (non-bigamous, for example) is the legal legitimate child of the husband. Period.
Yes, by statute in many areas, there has been a "conclusive presumption" that a child born during marriage was the child of the husband. But, the meaning of Constitutional terms like "natural born citizen" (a national, not a local concept) could never be controlled by some local statute.
I am not sure if some of the Founding Fathers thought that the citizenship of both of a child's parents was determinative of a NBC status for a child born in the United States. It's highly likely that most of them never cared about or even considered the issue. However, for those who did think that the citizenship of the parents of an American-born child was important to a NBC status, it was because they thought it important who the real parents were. Perhaps they didn't want to confer NBC status upon a child born of a union between some foreign king and an American woman married to another American man no matter what some local statute said.
Have you read the 1948 BNA? It says that UK citizenship only passes to legitimate children of a UK subject, which would not include Barry if his parents marriage was bigamous.
No, I've never read any 1948 BNA and I don't even know what it is. However, assuming Frank Marshall Davis and Stanley Ann Dunham were Obama's parents (as I now suspect), then the British will never claim Obama as a citizen.
Legal claims at birth via citizenship by descent are all that matters as far as a father is concerned. Under the law, a bastard child given birth by a married mother is the legal issue of her husband.
That is the case to this very day. How many cases of men being forced to maintain child support for the biological offspring of another man have we heard about in just the past several years?
Quite a few.
In around June of 2008, Barry’s campaign announced that the children of his father (clever lawyerly language) were governed by the British Nationality Act of 1948 (The 1948 BNA) and concluded that under that act Barry would have been a UK subject at birth. But that was true only if Barry was illegitimate, which under UK Kenyan colonial law he wasn’t due to an existing Kenyan marriage to Kezia.
The campaign got this declaration out there AFTER McCain had been declared NBC in a non-binding resolution and AFTER Barry had locked up the Dem nomination and it would have brought howls of racism if Barry’s eligibility had been challenged in June 2008. But they wanted to make sure it was out there so no one could later clam that they hid it.