http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/us/politics/14hawaii.html?partner=rss&emc=rssHawaii Limits Obama’s Birth Records
By MICHAEL COOPER
Published: May 13, 2010
HONOLULU — The conspiracy theorists who cling to the false belief that President Obama was born outside the United States outrage many Democrats and embarrass many Republicans. But to a group of state workers who toil away in a long building across from the Capitol, they represent something else: a headache and a waste of time.
The theorists, known as “birthers,” have deluged the state Health Department here with so many demands for information about the president’s birth in Hawaii that Gov. Linda Lingle, a Republican, signed a law this week allowing state agencies to ignore repeated requests from people who have had a request answered in the last year.
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“It became really, really a burden,” said Janice Okubo, a spokeswoman for the department, who said that handling the hundreds of requests took up huge amounts of the department’s time as it was trying to respond to an H1N1 flu outbreak. Many requests, she said, came from the same handful of people.
By Hawaiian law, birth records can only be released to people with “a direct and tangible” interest in them — a person born in the state, say, or certain relatives or their estates. So when questions about Mr. Obama’s birth first surfaced during the 2008 presidential election, his campaign posted a copy of his “certification of live birth” on a Web site; it states that Barack Hussein Obama II was born in Honolulu on Aug. 4, 1961, at 7:24 p.m.
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Some of the e-mail messages were vulgar, others hostile. Health department workers found themselves vilified on blogs. “Your name will be synonymous with Benedict Arnold by the time this is done,” reads one that is signed, “an American natural-born citizen.” State Senator Will Espero, a Democrat who has a picture in his office of Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. standing in front of a Hawaiian flag, said that he was dismayed by the persistent questions about the president’s birth. He noted that in 1961, newspapers in Honolulu printed birth announcements, including Mr. Obama’s.
“Unless somebody had a great conspiracy going back 40-something years, involving the newspapers and the hospitals, I don’t think there is any doubt,” Mr. Espero said.
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