It’s you that try to contort the constitution by saying there are three different types of citizens. I recognise that Natural born is the one held above all others as the standard for the presidency, and it is you that would apply that standard to almost anyone born in this country. I'm sorry but it's you that are making up three different classes of citizenship. I have said, over and over, that the Constitution allows for two types and two only - natural born and naturalized. If you are not one, then you are the other. If Obama was born in Hawaii then he certainly isn't naturalized, which leaved natural born and makes him Constitutionally eligible. The only alternative is a definition which makes every person not born in U.S. soil to U.S. citizen parents a naturalized citizen, and that is just ridiculous.
Which kind of, sort of, defeats the whole notion of a separate standards for who should be president doesn’t it?
Not at all. The founders wrote into the Constitution that the leader of this country should have a connection with it from the moment of birth. I have no disagreement with that. And according to the 14th Amendment any person born in the U.S. and subject to its jurisdiction is a citizen from the moment of birth, a natural born citizen. The Supreme Court has clarified the issue by stating that it is the place of birth that is the deciding factor, and not the citizenship of either parent. So in light of all that I can't see the justification for saying that there are degrees of natural-born citizenship, and somehow concluding that the super status, the one eligible for the presidency, requires conditions not defined anywhere.
How is it that you and I can go at this subject hammer and tong, neither giving any ground to the other, without once resorting to name calling or disparaging the other's intelligence, and many of your fellow adherents and virtually none of the Southron contingent can do the same?
No I didn't make up three distinct classes of citizenship, there is Natural Born and all other citizens, including one would suppose your rainbow citizens and Obama's Native born citizens along with naturalised citizens.
The government in it's duty to define things makes laws, and under those laws as written by the First Congress in 1790 is the definition of Natural born citizen, which I am sure you are aware of given your ability to locate certain obscure documents that make your case.
My point is that you know what the definition of Natural born is by law as it was written in our first congress by the very people that wrote the constitution, why then are you so willing to give Obama the legitimacy he cannot earn and does not deserve?
There it is the law as passed by the first Congress and the actual framers of the constitution, and undoubtedly signed into law by our first president. Historian that you are, how can you take anything else from those words but what they mean...