Reply #31: Giving in to birthers is like negotiating with terrorists -- you risk opening the floodgates

[markpkessinger]

Look, I'm as tired as anyone else of the birthers' nonsense. But here's the thing: President Obama proved his citizenship to the satisfaction of the Federal Election Commission, the body tasked with ensuring that candidates who run for office are constitutionally eligible to do so. What's more, every court that has looked at birther challenges has thrown them out. The legal birth certificate the President did, in fact, produce was legally sufficient, so the birthers' insistence on ever more documentation is motivated either by a malevolent desire to feed and water the ignorance of a certain portion of the electorate, or it is motivated by irrational bigotry and xenophobia. But whichever it is (and it is probably some of both), to give in to their demands would be to afford an element of legitimacy to the birthers, and to their lunatic theories, that they simply do not deserve at this point. And, I fear, giving in to their demand on this question would open the floodgates to a whole new round of fringe groups demanding the President prove his legitimacy on an ever-expanding number of absurd non-issues.