Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/09/17/youre-next.html
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6 Likes
I’m halfway expecting something like this to happen to me the next time I renew my passport. These scumbags are looking for excuses to deny them to as many people as possible in order to set new precedents about who (including existing citizens) deserves bloody citizenship.
26 Likes
Great. My wife and I have to renew mine very soon, and we’re in Houston. I already got harassed at the airport every time I flew until I finally threw down $85 for PreCheck so they’d leave me alone.
14 Likes
Okay…
If a birth certificate, the first form of official identification that one can get in the US, somehow “isn’t sufficient” proof of id, then what the fuck is?
42 Likes
Being white and Republican.
41 Likes
There are probably hundreds of thousands of people in rural areas of the USA that obtained their birth certificates in the same way, right? Wasn’t home birth still commonplace until well after WWII in communities without nearby hospitals?
I can’t imagine a courthouse that isn’t an institution. This sounds like a toxic stew of parochialism and authoritarianism - someone was given the power to reject applications, and that someone isn’t aware of anything other than urban birth customs, and is looking for excuses to excercise authority.
21 Likes
What… you mean you don’t have to be straight, male and Xtian too?
20 Likes
If America was an individual, an intervention or institutionalization would have happened by now. I know it is a big place with a large population, but perhaps a national message of “think twice before doing something crazy” would help?
Like, the American version of “Keep Calm and Carry On”, before that became ironic.
2 Likes
Who the fuck has a “family Bible”?
27 Likes
The “family Bible”? I’m missing some cultural reference here Is it common to write the names and dates of children in a bible?
5 Likes
geez, duh
Never heard that before
16 Likes
Certainly helps, but if you’re not Protestant, you’ll be on the “I like you. That’s why I’ll destroy you last,” list.
14 Likes
Annnnnd how is that legit? Some raggedy hocus pocus book with blurred unreadable signatures?
21 Likes
For my father, they would have been happy with a baptismal record, but ultimately settled on a signed note from his mother.
1 Like
No kidding. Seems like the very reason for which birth certificates were invented.
17 Likes
Real Americans™, that’s who. That’s why they’re giving a book of fairy tales with scrawled family trees greater weight than a document issued by the bad ol’ government.
33 Likes
Meanwhile, as a white man, I was once allowed on a flight out of LAX even though I’d lost my only photo ID and had nobody with my to vouch for my identity. No extra security or anything.
16 Likes
It’s like this. In colonial America many families, particularly on the frontier, had no access to any other method of keeping track of family history. Nearly every family had at least one bible, and some had a copy of Shakespeare, but other than that paper and books just weren’t necessarily available.
Family bibles are one of the most significant historical resouces for tracking geneology in America and there are well known methods of validating them.
If one rejects family bibles as a record for religious reasons, one abandons history and science.
5 Likes
Paris Hilton?
I’m perfectly OK with them as a valid criterion for getting into the DAR, and maybe not so much for a US Passport.
15 Likes
