But I will delve one yard below their mines/ And blow them at the moon.”
–— Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4
For more information on this go to:
- Adoption is War–Daniel Ibn Zayd, Transracial Eyes
- CHIFF is Officially on the Crazy Train – ,Kevin Haebeom Vollmers , Land of Gazillion Adopttes
In case you’re not convinced that CHIFF supporters have gone thoroughly batshit over their bill to funnel the children of the world into the US Adoption Mill check out the fun on Twitter over the last few days.
Martha Osborne aka Raindow Kids News and our favorite AdoptaTrot mouthpiece Katy Jay Gordon aka Katy Jay aka AdoptInternational
vs
lots of adoptee rights/adoption critical tweeters including myself.
The “dialogue” between Martha Osborne and more than a half dozen CHIFF opponents is scrubbed missing from Twitter. Earlier, I gave Osborne the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I just couldn’t find it. But now. on her own feed, there’s a big gap in her postings between March 19 and March 24, and all of her posts from that period have disappeared from my own feed. To the casual observer it appears we were talking to an imaginary rabbit.. If somebody snapped a picture of it before it went the way of all flesh, please forward it to me and I’ll stick it in here.
The first rule of debate is to “know your enemy,” a rule of which the CHIFF entourage, particularity Ms. Osborne seems unaware, but we are not. That is, actually know something about the person you are debating, even in a 140 character debate.
It all started on March 21 when Ms. Osborne took it upon herself to rant up an adoption academic tweeting under #STOPChiff, accusing her of criticizing the bill in order to sell her forthcoming book. (Ms. Osborne has obviously never published a scholarly book.) As usual, anyone opposing any crack-brained adoption or child welfare deform such as legalized baby dumping or global child snatching has some pecuniary interest to protect. Unlike the open-armed and -hearted multi-billion dollar/$60,000 a kid US adoption industry that pimps CHIFF in the “best interests of the child” .and would no doubt do adoptions for free if they could.
Bastardette replied with the following two tweets is short succession My computer is giving me a hard time making screen shots so I”e cut and pasted from my Twitter):
Daily Bastardette @DBastardette @RainbowKidsNews @arissaoh Apparently demanding ethical adoptions is now “anti-adoption.” #stopchiff
@RainbowKidsNews @arissaoh So adopted adults have no business in the discourse? Just shut up and be grateful?
In turn, Ms. Osborne, breaking the first rule of debate, unilaterally declared that Bastardette is not adopted, and therefore had no business weighing in on CHIFF. Unlike the typical attempt to just silence the bastard voice or claim it doesn’t exist unless it agrees with her own– it appears Ms. Osborne is just stupid even if shutting me up was the naive goal.
My putative Late Discovery Not Adoptee (LDNA) status, of course, came as a huge shock. I was rocked by the truth–known only by Martha Osborne–that my parents were sadists who lied to me my whole life. about my birth status and identity. I was, in reality, a born Greiner, not a graft.. Just as shocking is the amount of money my parents must have spread around for decades to convince me that I am adopted. Bribes to Toledo Florence Crittenton. Lucas County Probate Court, lawyers, social workers, Ohio Vital Statistics, family members and friends, counterfeiters for dozens of forged documents. I’m impressed.
Moreover, Ms Osborne smuggly informed me that she herself is not only an adoptee, but the adopter of five special needs children–whose picture, as it turns out, she plastered (until a day ago) on her Facebook banner which she claims was not available for public view, but as anyone who has a FB page knows, is. Unlike Bastardette, Ms. Osborne walks the high road. Bastardette walks….well…elsewhere.
To cap her ignorance, Ms. Osborne ended our part of the discussion with, “you are all about white privilege.” That coming from somebody who wants to gangbang the US State Department and turn the developing world into a child fetish factory for affluent white, mostly Christian (according to the CHIFF endorsement list) Americans Several tweeters in this thread, btw, were transracial adoptees.
Now, let’s move on to Ms. Katy Jay Gordon, the bankruptcy lawyer cum international adoption expert and wordsmith who never met an adoptee who shouldn’t be shut up with a moldy gym sock in the mouth. Her blog, Children Deserve Families and Grundyesque twitterings are full of lectures to adoption oppositionists and ethicists, which she lumps into one lump.. Obsessed with her own out-sourced motherhood-in-waiting, Ms. Jay degrades biological families and cultures of the children she hopes to drop behind America’s white picket fences, including her own. When posed with questions like “why go overseas to adopt when there’s lots of US kids in fostercare here who need homes?” Ms. Jay blasts off attack blogs.the promote bandaid solutions to systemic rot and poverty. Kinda like taking two aspirin and calling the doctor in the morning when you’ve got a brain tumor.
(My emphasis):
What makes this even more sickening is that opponents understand the scope of the crisis, but they cling to ideology and power politics over the basic human rights of children. Instead, UNICEF employs an immoral hostage strategy, which is finally being recognized for what it is, in which UNICEF keeps children in orphanages to create pressure on the developed world to do something to solve the poverty and injustice that prevent their birth parents from raising them.
Does she tell her bankrupt clients to put their kids on the adoption block to make ends meet?
Then there’s this bizarro tweet from March 24 regarding more on fostercare:
AdoptInternational @AdoptInterna Only people who don’t care about children try to pit children in need (in the US) against children in need (abroad) against one another
Not even a decent deflection. Maybe we could make a trade off. A few kids in my local foster system for some Congolese. “orphans.”
But even these ramblings pale with last night’s weird smear of adoption theorist, intellectual, and critic Daniel Ibn Zayd, a re-matriated bastard now living and teaching in Lebanon. Daniel pounded a few well-placed punches into Ms. Jay’s globalist approach to family engineering, and apparently Ms Jay was so numbed out that she failed to respond in a coherent manner. Instead she punch drunked back:
I’d say Ms. Jay not only hoisted herself on her own petard, but the entire CHIFF campaign went up with her. Is this what big money cats like Foster Friess are paying for?
Batshit indeed!
Daniel’s reply, Adoption is War, the best analysis of US adoption policy and neo-colonialism I’ve ever read, is linked at the top of this blog. It’s important.
Join me on Twitter DBastardette
.
Let me preface this, for those who do not know me, by saying that I am an international adoptive father. I do not oppose all international adoption. I happen to believe that men and women throughout the world are as capable of making decisions about the future of their children as is any man or woman in the United States. “Cultural imperialism” takes many forms, including the belief in one’s own moral and intellectual superiority.
In my more charitable moments, I’m inclined to think that CHIFFers simply don’t understand how terrible child trafficking has been over the decades since international adoption became popular. I recall sitting in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in the early 1990s, struggling to read a news article describing a recent police raid on one of many casas de engorde (fattening houses) where stolen or purchased infants were made presentable for international adoption. Corruption in the neighboring Guatemala became so endemic that the U.S. refused to approve any adoption without dna testing confirming that the mother was who she purported to be.
Could CHIFFers be ignorant of the decades of abuse found in international adoption practices? It’s hard to credit. U.S. ratification of the Hague was delayed for years, largely by those who stood to profit by that delay and the prospective adoptive parents and adtoptive parents they convinced to stand behind them. With international adoptions down two-thirds from their high point, it’s hard to even consider that the industry’s support of CHIFF might be motivated by anything other than the bottom line, dressed in acceptable rhetoric.
International adoption is not, and has never been, a credible means of addressing the inability of another nation to provide for its children. At best, it’s been about fulfilling the desires of prospective adopters, women faced with the task of providing for a child in a culture in which they had little hope of succeeding and children whose future otherwise lay in the streets of their homelands.
Those streets can be deadly. My son’s brother was kidnapped and murdered by gang members in his teens. His brother in law, a hardworking husband and father, was shot dead in the streets by local police, for reasons that have never been explained. Another brother died of liver disease. His mother died at an early age of a lung condition. Life in a third world country is deadly, let there be no doubt about it.
Even at its height, however, international adoption did nothing to address the needs of the majority of children. Instead of directing our national efforts, and our money, to that task, we granted special tax credits to those adopting, domestically and internationally, raising costs and profits at the expense of those adopting.
Yes, there are thousands of children whose physical circumstances could be improved by international adoption. That does not come without its costs to the adoptee, however. I know that from personal experience. Today, as when I began my process, the question remains: how many children are we willing to see stolen, purchased or otherwise improperly pried from their families of origin in order to fill the desires of Americans seeking children? Today, as always, the answer should be zero.
Dear Bastardette,
Thank you for your blog, which I follow with interest. I appreciate your standing up for truth and openness in adoption. I am an adoptive mother of a daughter from China. I support ethics and reform in adoption. I want to hear the opinions and feelings of adoptees because I love my daughter and want her to grow up with a healthy and accurate understanding of where she came from and why. I just want you to know that not all adoptive parents support CHIFF or want to silence you. Thanks for being there, and keep it up!
Maureen Topper,
I’m an international adoptee and I’m most strongly against CHIFF. As someone who was too young to decide whether to come to the US or not, but who knows what I’ve lost due to other people’s decisions, I’m embarrassed and horrified that my country’s leaders refuse to listen to the people who’s experience and expertise can teach them a lot (if children’s welfare were their goal). Instead, they’ve made it clear that babies and children’s lives are only valuable to the bottom line. That families, communities, and relationships mean nothing, unless it will add to their bottom line. Those are not the values of a country I would be proud of.
A country that treats human beings, babies and children as chattel is a not a country of love, compassion, or kindness. A country that tries to distract and delude its citizens into shopping for human beings and cover up the voices of reason and compassion is not a country of valor or honest, morality or courage.
Thank you, Kym. I agree wholeheartedly!
People are always being accused of being anti-adoption or having to defend their stance on “adoption”. In my opinion, people are waaay too concerned over “adoption”. I have my opinion about adoption, but it really isn’t as important as my opinion on the welfare of people. Adoption is a practice, a system. I’m not interested in debating adoption, the system, whether it should stay, go, or change. It’s a way to direct the debate away from what’s more important – people, their lives, families, communities, livelihoods, etc.
We should discuss working on making the lives of people better, not making the system of adoption better. But, then again, that’s what CHIFFers want us to do, discuss adoption, not people. Because if we talk about people, we might actually make the lives of people better (but that wouldn’t make as much money).
Let’s talk about children’s rights, children’s lives, and children’s families (and that will lead to relevant topics).