Sheriff Joe Arpaio, from Arizona, has made the assertion that the long-form birth certificate of President Obama’s, that was presented in April of 2011, is a forgery. This is a claim that has been made before by other people, and it has been refuted by Snopes.com.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio is not the first person to question whether or not President Obama’s birth certificate is real. He claims that he has conducted a six month long investigation with his “cold case posse”, that has led him to the conclusion that what was presented as President Obama’s long-form birth certificate is “a computer-generated fraud”.
To be clear, Sheriff Arpaio has emphasized that he is not accusing President Obama himself of committing the crime of forgery. Instead, he believes that forgers committed two crimes: creating a fraudulent document, and presenting it to the public. He wants the United States Congress to investigate his findings.
The birth certificate that the Arizona Sheriff is questioning is one that was released to the public in 2011. President Obama released his long-form birth certificate because, to make a long story short, there were a whole lot of people who were interested in taking a look at it.
A long-form birth certificate is a photocopy, or identical image, of the original birth certificate. It shows all of the medical and non-medical information, and it shows the hand-written signatures that were signed on it. Usually, a short-form birth certificate is just fine, except for situations involving dual citizenship or international adoptions.
Snopes.com has been around since 1995. The website started as a husband and wife team who were interested in investigating and researching urban legends. Today, the website have become one of the World Wide Web’s essential resources.
They investigate all kinds of things, and they have taken the time to do some research about President Obama’s birth certificate. To get the full story, I would advise reading over what Snopes put on their website regarding Obama’s birth certificate.
I will point out one thing, though. The state of Hawaii is the state where the birth certificate was issued. Officials from Hawaii have certified that the copy of the birth certificate that they provided to President Obama was real. I cannot think of a more reliable source of authentication than to have the officials from the state that issued a birth certificate evaluate it, and publicly state that it is real.
Image by Bernard Pollack on Flickr