Birtherism for everyone: Kansas woman told birth certificate can't be used for passport renewal

I’ve literally been waiting for this administration to change to file certain paperwork. Under any other administration, it would be routine. But it can wait, and so it does.

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If this is a renewal, and both a passport and a copy of a birth certificate are provided if they are documents emitted by an US authority they were implying that the documents weren’t valid. I suppose they could be rejected only making a complaint of forgery or fraudulent misinterpretation, in other word is assumed that the document is fake or the authority who made the document had written fake informations on the document.
Otherwise refusing the renovation is abuse of office.

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I worked a temp job in the Chicago facility in 2007 for a week while job hunting.

The irony here is that most US passports are being processed by People of Color.

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Hold that thought. I’m just going to take my family bible down to the DMV to renew my driver’s license. Back in a jiff!

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Being rich and white.

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I get harassed at airports semi-regularly to the point that i’m more surprised when they don’t “randomly” select me for additional screening. Which is more sad than anything. The last time it happened was a few years ago when i was still with my ex-wife, the TSA agent saw that we were together and then tried to wave her on before they tried to screen me. She made a fuss about it and they wouldn’t screen her too, but to get things moving along i told her to go on. It was a minor inconvenience to me because i was used to it but she was pretty pissed about it the whole thing.

Also further back in time, right after 9/11 happened i was traveling alone and i was 16 or 17. I got screened at security… and then 2 more times after i went through security. I don’t know what looks suspicious about a baby faced 16yo kid (besides that i’m brown)

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This is all very strange to me.

Wouldn’t it be open religious bigotry to refuse to accept a valid record of genealogy due to it being written adjacent to scripture one dislikes?

I have to disagree based on personal experience. I have relatives whose only record of birth is in their family bibles (although, admittedly only a couple of those were born after 1945 - hi Cousin Leonard!). There is no reason for them to be considered aliens or denied passports.

I imagine that within my children’s lifetimes the family bible method of validating citizenship through parentage will become unnecessary.

But right now, denying birthrights to people due to religion is something I am very much saddened to see anyone endorsing.

It’s strange to think that people are according a nameless clerk in a courthouse unimpeachable veracity - when this is known to be untrue - in order to discredit the first-person historical records of mothers and fathers. One acts for pay, the other acts for love, and somehow the love is untrustworthy. Again, this saddens me.

By the way, the courthouse where my mother’s birth certificate was held burned down in the 50s and she never had a copy. Does that mean she is not permitted to travel abroad? The family has abundant documentation of her lineage for many, many generations, but the state has failed to maintain theirs. Perhaps she should be harshly punished for the failures of the state?

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Not sure how it works now under the current administration but it used to be that if you had previously been issued a passport that all you needed to do was send in the expired one for the renewal without having to go through the original proof of citizenship steps. Things may have changed however.

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The weird thing is that a record in a family bible is one of the “proofs of birth” that they will grudgingly accept INSTEAD of a contemporaneous birth certificate. Because back when the regulations were written, there were plenty of people out on the plains where nobody bothered to take a wagon trip all the way out to the county courthouse to register their births. It’s not that there aren’t sometimes issues with birth certificates, but they are far superior as a record of birth than a family bible.

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Conflation of issues; that’s not what’s happening here right now.

Um… “love” and one’s familial bonds are not legal evidence of one’s identity.

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That depends, if more than 10 years pass after your passport expires its like you never had one. You have to start fresh. I had to go through this myself 3 years ago when i decided to renew my passport, it had expired something like 10 years and a couple of months.

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People are not taking umbrage with your family’s faith. The problem is a family bible should be given no special privilege over any other kind of self-generated family history. If my parents just had an old journal sitting around would that be accepted for passport renewal?

If i were to handcraft some paper and ink and manually age it in the oven, would that be accepted for passport renewal?

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People are joking about the religious aspect, but the point is that demanding a hand-written and unauthenticated record written in the flyleaf of any book instead of a valid document issued by the state is ridiculous.

If anything, specifying a family Bible vs. some other family ledger speaks to a potential violation of the Establishment Clause.

The person in the article was born in the 1970s. Approx. when and where were Cousin Leonard and your other relative with no state-issued birth certificate born?

That’s a complete misrepresentation of what anyone here is saying. Civil and polite BS is still BS.

Yes, how dare we rely on the bad ol’ state (that can do no right) to record births, deaths, and marriages when we can rely on the iron-clad word of family members (who never have ulterior motives)?

How to replace lost or stolen ID cards | USAGov . You’re welcome.

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This is new to me. So some questions?

  1. What makes it valid? Can I just steal a bible from the local motel and jot down some names?
  2. Must it be in a bible?
  3. Could I write a bunch of names and dates in a trapper keeper?
  4. What if it’s written in the satanic bible? Will states in the bible belt suddenly care which scripture it is adjacent to?

A nameless clerk is not above making human errors but they have little motivation to lie? Versus parents who in some cicumstances have a huge reason to forge alternate identies for their children and just because it is written in a bible doesn’t magically stop a person from lying.

ETA: spelling errors

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That’s what I’m concerned about in light of situations like this. It used to be that you filled out form DS-82, tossed in the old passport, a recent photo, and the fee (and maybe a marriage certificate) and the State Dept. would send you a new one in 4-6 weeks.

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The woman in the article was renewing hers, so i’m not sanguine that having an expired one will matter anymore.

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Lying.

(Sorry; I couldn’t keep my inner ‘spelling police’ officer in check.)

ITA with everything else stated.

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Barbara was born in a farmhouse in the 1970s in Leavenworth County. She had a birth certificate. Her father went to the courthouse days after she was born to certify her birth – raised seal and all.

Hey - that sounds like my “original” copy. Which is now sitting in some Polish bureaucrats file most likely, from a failed attempt my MiL made to get my kid dual citizenship.

Anyway, uh, what? A family bible somehow has more credibility than a State issued Birth certificate? Because I can forge a family bible, no problem.

I sorta want to update my passport - not that I can afford to go anywhere. I don’t think the hospital I was born in is even around anymore, so getting a new one may prove a challenge…

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