Agreed regarding the patrilineal issue. I don’t really get the point of the discussion of multiple persons who don’t share offspring. Sure, there’s the Parents-Teachers Association; single parents welcome. But what we are talking about are the “parents” of a single individual.
There really isn’t much of an issue here except for those who want Obama to have inherited his citizenship through his mother, something that I can’t really find any Constitutional basis for since the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified.
Not really. The phrase in question is 'children of parents' Multiple children of a single set of parents doesn't make any more sense, and arguably less in the context of citizenship of the mother acquired by marriage, than multiple children of multiple fathers. Also, any case where the number of objects involved is one or more, or simply unknown, the plural is used. For example, consider the question of 'How many people are in that car?' Well, if it is one then they might be excluded from the carpool lane, but we don't know unless we examine the specific case. 'How many miles is distance [x]?' It might be one, but the plural is used for any amount, be it fewer than, greater than, or exactly one, or even a fractional value, until we explicitly evaluate the case. So, if they meant either one or two parents they would have used the plural, and if they meant only the fathers of multiple unrelated children they would also have used the plural.
"There really isn’t much of an issue here except for those who want Obama to have inherited his citizenship through his mother, something that I can’t really find any Constitutional basis for since the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified."
Equal Rights Amendment considerations aside, she was not eligible by statute, but a reasonable Common Law argument could be made for Obama to have gained citizenship through his mother if there weren't an existing body of law that precluded it. As far as gender issues go, the 14th is gender neutral and all gender specific language had disappeared by the 1934 statute.