The suit was filed Monday in Superior Court in Sacramento.

Keyes ran for the presidency under the American Independent Party. In 2004, he ran against Obama as a Republican for the U.S. Senate seat in Illinois.

The Obama campaign countered similar accusations during the presidential primaries by posting Obama’s certification of live birth, and saying: “Barack Obama was born in the state of Hawaii in 1961, a native citizen of the United States of America.”

The state of Hawaii in October said that Obama’s birth certificate is genuine. The Constitution requires that a President must have been born in the US.

Keyes, a Maryland conservative radio commentator, was parachuted into Illinois to run against Obama in 2004. He has a long history of anti-gay rhetoric and during the senatorial campaign accused Obama of being soft on gay marriage, after the Democrat said he opposed an amendment to the Constitution that would ban same-sex marriage.

In an interview with the Chicago Tribune during the campaign, Keyes accused Obama of talking out of both sides of his mouth when it comes to same-sex marriage.

“He knows black people oppose gay marriage,” and he speaks out against it in black communities, Keyes said. “But he takes out full-page ads in the gay newspapers putting 100 percent of his support behind the gay agenda.”

Keyes has frequently spoken out against adding sexual orientation to human rights laws federally and in Maryland, and has fought against including gays in hate crimes laws. Keyes has consistently maintained that gay rights cannot be compared to the struggle for equality faced by African Americans.

In a 2004, radio interview Keyes dismissed a question from a WBEZ reporter that sexuality might be biologically determined.

“We as human beings cannot assert that our sexual desires cannot be controlled,” Keyes said. He said such a claim would “consign us to the real of instinctual animal nature– and we are not there.”

Keyes was equally outspoken at the 2004 Republican National Convention. During a convention interview with Sirius OutQ radio host Michelangelo Signorile, Keyes called homosexuality “selfish hedonism.”

Signorile then asked Keyes whether he considered Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney a “selfish hedonist.”

“Of course she is,” Keyes replied. “That goes by definition. Of course she is.”

“If we embrace homosexuality as a proper basis for marriage, we are saying that it’s possible to have a marriage state that in principle excludes procreation and is based simply on the premise of selfish hedonism,” he told Signorile.

Keyes was roundly defeated by Obama in the race for the Senate and later joined the American Independent Party.

In 2005, Keyes’ own daughter came out and he severed ties with her. Since then, he has refused to discuss publicly his estrangement from Maya Marcel-Keyes.

The following year, an organizer for a conservative political action group founded by Keyes publicly linked homosexuality with infant pedophilia.

“The newest thing in Chicago, it’s becoming a trend, and you’re gonna find this hard to believe…sex with infants,” Guy Adams, of Renew America told an Internet radio show hosted by fellow conservative Stacy L. Harp.

Adams offered no evidence to back up his claims of infant pedophilia.

He appeared on Harp’s program to discuss the Gay Games, which had just concluded in Chicago and embarked on a nearly 30 minute with Harp to attack gays.

“It’s not enough that they have…you know when you engage in perversion, and homosexuality is perversion, we don’t hate the gays mind you, we don’t hate them, we hate what they’re doing…pretty soon that perversion is like addiction, it’s not enough, so you need to graduate to something else. You need to move on. So now they’re having sex with animals, a small group that’s getting bigger, sex with infants, sex in the street in Chicago out in the open, it’s just getting more and more perverted.”