Steven D. Laib argues that Obama’s birth certificate (long form) must be made public.

A person seeking much lower privileges, such a driver’s license or voter registration must produce a birth certificate; why not a candidate for the highest office in the land. Which situation implies a higher duty by government officials; state statutes or the national constitution? …

The state of Hawaii is asserting that privacy laws forbid it from revealing the certificate. This should be considered a bogus claim. Anyone running for the presidency has placed himself in the arena of a public, rather than a private citizen. A candidate is, for all practical purposes, giving up his privacy rights, and making his or her entire life open to scrutiny by the public and the press. Their personal records should and must be part of this. …

If the certificate is never produced, and proper birth status is never verified, one way or the other, it will likely become the core of another Great American Conspiracy Theory such as those surrounding the death of John F. Kennedy. The Kennedy assassination conspiracies have been debunked, for all practical purposes, but they haven’t gone away. We don’t need another one of these things.

Read the whole thing.