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I have not received a response to my revised, simplified request yet, and this in turn makes me concerned that were I to make my request more detailed and specific that they would treat it any better than what they are doing now.

I therefore made some (expensive) telephone calls for the purpose of trying to find out the answer to the revised simple natural born citizen criteria question, without mentioning any person (specifically without mentioning Obama or Fukino).

One one call I spent about 25 minutes with a woman. It turned out that her first answer seemed, at least to me, somewhat off the cuff and someone’s own opinion. First, I stated the question very carefully. Upon hearing the question she needed more clarification on the question which I gave. Then she intermittently put me on hold and finally gave me what sounded like an informal personal opinion which was that Barack Obama was a natural born citizen because he was born in Hawaii. Obviously this was not responsive to my question which did not mention Obama at all, and told her so. This got the conversation off on a tangent about how good Barack Obama was, and that his mother was definitely an American citizen and that he was definitely born in Hawaii.

I restated the original question and was asked what was so important about it. This got the discussion off on the tangent of what the Constitution means by “natural born citizen.” The woman stated — I paraphrase — that her commonsense definition of the term natural born citizen was that the person must be born in the United States. I mentioned the importance of the original interpretation of the Constitution and the significance of Vattel’s contemporary definition (including that both parents must be citizens) given that the Constitution did not define the term natural born citizen. The woman insisted that that wording was not in the Constitution and therefore not valid. She went on to say that Obama was an American citizen and good president doing good work for the country and trying his best, and that misguided and vicious people that did not like his politics were trying to say he was unfit to be president.

I told her that I was not calling for a discussion of anyone’s personal politics— hers, mine, Dr. Fukino’s, or Obama’s. I was merely trying to get a factual answer to the original factual and impersonal question.

Eventually she told me that she would investigate the matter further and get a response to me later.

The woman then told me that their government office has been receiving many calls from impolite and rude people who were frequently demanding copies of Obama’s birth certificate. She said that it was very trying to deal with those people and that it was difficult to deal civilly with such callers. I told her I understood and did not approve of those callers either.

I think the bottom line is that most of the government workers are not really legally tuned in to the intricacies of the Obama natural born citizen controversy. Their reaction to any question surrounding the controversy tends to be personal and emotional. Perhaps many of them regard any skepticism concerning Obama as a personal attack on their own personal and deeply held political beliefs. This in turn prevents those of us who have dispassionate factual questions concerning Obama with legitimate concerns from being paid attention to given all the noise on both sides of the issues. It may be beneficial to keep these considerations in mind when trying to get information from such government officials and employees...