“Cannot anyone view his birth certificate or do you have to prove you have a right to do so?”
You have to be the person in question, or a close relative. And due to HIPPA laws, the hospital (if there is one) can’t confirm or deny his birth, and the Governor, Sec of State, Director of Records - no one - can speak to the issue themelves. All they can say is “there is one on file”.
The only non-relative way to get the information is through a court order.
But I read an article recently - someone sued, through the Freedom of Information Act, to see Obama’s Occidental College records (they wanted to see if he had applied or received funding as a “foreign student”). As I understand it, with a court case like that, the college must turn over the info. So what did they do? The first thing Occidental did was to contact Obama to cue them in, so they could do something to stop it.
It just seemed strange to me with the US freedom of information being much more open with other records than in the UK that birth certificates could not be routinely requested and looked at by all.
In Britain you can look at and by paying a fee obtain any death, marriage or birth certificate of course you need to know where and approximately where the person was born/married or died in order to get the number from the register but apart from that this is all you would need.