The following headline caught my attention the other day:

BREAKING: Supreme Court Judges Say Obama Birth Certificate A Fake

WHAAAAAAAAAAA????????

My first clue that this article might not be entirely on the level—I mean aside from the extremely WTF headline—is that it was posted on a website called The U.S. Patriot. I decided to look closer.

First off, the article itself made clear that this was an Alabama Supreme Court judge. Not the U.S. Supreme Court. Not even the entire Alabama Supreme Court.

Next, we learn that the judge in question is Chief Justice Roy Moore, the guy who just can’t seem to stop embarrassing the entire country in the news. He made his remarks about the president’s birth certificate in a dissenting opinion. So he wasn’t even part of the court’s actual decision.

The decision is in McInnish v. Bennett, in which Virgil Goode, the 2012 Constitution Party presidential nominee, and Hugh McInnish, head of the Alabama Republican Party, filed suit against Alabama Secretary of State Beth Chapman, later replaced by Jim Bennett. The lawsuit sought to compel the state to verify the eligibility of all of the candidates on the state’s 2012 presidential ballot. In plain English, they wanted the Alabama secretary of state to verify that President Obama’s birth certificate is genuine again. It’s difficult to find much reporting on the case outside of some of the crazier corners of the internet because, quite frankly, the only thing newsworthy is that people are still wasting the court system’s time with this.

The Alabama Supreme Court wisely affirmed the lower courts, which dismissed Goode’s and McInnish’s case. What’s interesting is that the court affirmed without an opinion. Moore wrote a dissent in an opinion-less case. Two judges wrote concurrences in an opinion-less case, partly to respond to Moore and partly to note the lack of any statutory means for confirming the eligibility of presidential candidates (because no one outside of Alabama ever checks these sorts of things.) Another justice wrote a separate dissent as well. In all, we have an 83-page set of concurring and dissenting opinions attached to one sentence affirming the lower courts. It’s, uh, surreal.

• Justice Michael F. Bolin, concurring: 23 pages
• Justice Tommy Bryan, concurring: 1 page
• Chief Justice Roy Moore, dissenting: 54 pages
• Justice Tom Parker, dissenting: 3 pages

I’d tell you what the judges wrote, but honestly, who cares?

Photo credit: Dave Winer [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Flickr.