S799: ANOTHER NEW JERSEY UPDATE

New Jersey S799 has been assigned to the Assembly Human Services Committee. (click committee link) No hearing date has been scheduled.

Wanna hear more?

Read the guest editorial by The New Jersey Coalition to Defend Privacy in Adoption, NJ adoption reform: Protect the privacy of all parties in today’s Newark Star-Ledger. The op-ed is headed with a cute but irrelevant picture of a 3-year old waiting to be anonymized by the Middlesex County Court. It will only take a minute, honey, and it won’t hurt a bit. We doubt that 20 years from now little Faith Deuschel will be happy to learn she was pimped as an adoption secret and potential public enemy.

The New Jersey Coalition to Defend Privacy in Adoption is an unholy alliance of the New Jersey ACLU, the NJ Bar Association, the National Council for Adoption, New Jersey Right to Life, the Lutheran Office of Governmental Ministry in New Jersey, and The New Jersey Catholic Council–industry hacks, panderers, shamers, and control freaks–whacking off desperately in their great big bed. I wrote about them here, and you can find their 2008 statement here, but the original link to the “organization” is gone.

Here are the relevant parts:

Misstatements and misrepresentations are being made by individuals and groups trying to eliminate privacy for birth mothers — a privacy that has been protected by law for decades. These groups claim that New Jersey’s adoption law only protects the adopted child. That claim, however, is inaccurate.

Although the best interest of the child is paramount, New Jersey’s adoption law protects all of the parties involved in an adoption: the child, the birth parents and the adopting parents. It is important to note, however, that the select group of advocates who lobby to change the law in New Jersey and other states are no longer children, but adults…

They then go on to blather about the defunct Mills v Atlantic City case. Funny, no mention of Sundquist and Oregon decisions that defuncted it. (Go here for a brief synopsis of suits; I can’t find a copy of Mills. If anyone has one, I’d be glad to link it),

The op-ed closes with:

Our coalition supports sensible and compassionate legislation that would take into consideration the interests of all parties. The foundation of such a system is an effective mutual consent registry established by the state to provide adoptees with access to their birth parents’ medical history and to link birth parents and adult adopted persons when the parties have requested and consented to such a reunion.

This mutual consent registry system would use qualified individuals and agencies to function as intermediaries to locate and verify the identity of adopted persons and birth parents. In the case in which a birth parent is unwilling to reunite, the intermediary would attempt to obtain family and medical history for the adoptee.

An analytic reader, of course, will notice that deformers and the “opposition” feed off each other. The Coalition statement is an ideological mirror of S799. Both spin protectionist language that degrades and infantalizes adopted persons and their families (original and adoptive). Both reject a class-based full restoration of the obc right. Both advocate a “special right” for parents to remain anonymous from their own offspring. Both espouse a nicey-nice “need” for medical information for which there is no right or semi-right–and information certainly not available through an obc, and in fact, guts the entire rights debate.

Bastardette and Bastard Nation oppose SA799 for legal and ethical reasons, but we also know self-interested flim-flam when we see it. This is flim-flammery at its AdoptionLand finest.

The legal arguments are done. We won. When will deformers stop campaigning on the enemy’s terms? When will both just shut up and get out of the way?