T
he other day I wrote that Both Ends Burning was closing down its Scottsdale office and moving to Washington DC to play with the big boys. It’s true.
I don’t know if I missed this when I was researching BEB’s future or it wasn’t up yet, but the game plan is now on BEB’s webpage under Our Next Steps Forward:
International Adoption Futurama
• Open our Washington, DC office, hire full-time staff and build necessary infrastructure.
• Establish 50 BEB state organizations and plan UN-STUCK marches in each state for May 2014.
• Plan and organize the Summit of Nations meeting to take place in Fall 2014.
• Launch iAdopt International Advisory Services and begin to facilitate cross-border knowledge sharing.
• Produce success story series as a revolving weekly feature on our web site.
To facilitate on-going communication we will have an regularly scheduled UN-STUCK MOVEMENT Stakeholder conference call the first Tuesday of every month at 4 PM EST. Our next call will be June 4th. An email will be sent in advance with call-in information.
To ensure the success of this movement, we encourage open communication. Please feel free to contact us at [email protected] at any time, for any reason.
This outline has got to be the most ambitious and dangerous blueprint to up-end attempts at ethical adoption transparency and reform in the US that I have ever seen.
On one level the plan serves as a framework, designed by BEB, supported by the “orphan adoption movement” and CHIFFers. backed with big money, and pimped with slick expensive media campaigns such as The Stuck Tour.The sole purpose is to create an atmosphere of international “orphan crisis” in order to gain public and Congressional support for Orphan Inc’s agenda: (1) to change US law and policy to make it easier for US paps to adopt children internationally and (2) to pressure foreign countries to ease their own laws and regulations regarding US cross-country adoption, and encourage families and governments to ship.their children into the arms of desperate and childless Americans who can pay a good price for them..
On another level, BEB creates a structure that looks grassroots.with its recruitment of paps and international adopters, but isn’t. .Like the Tea Party BEB plans very much remind me of how a dozen years ago kitchen table do-gooders constructed a national newborn abandonment crisis in the US when none existed. This “crisis” ended up with the heavily pressured passage of state “safe haven” laws that circumvent best practice standards, endanger the lives of pregnant women and newborns, and gut identity and fathers rights by creating thousands of undocumented fast-track surrendered babies abandoned “legally” and anonymously with no questions asked.
The only difference this time is that the ‘orphan crisis” is not being fronted by kitchen table activists and housewives (other than props) with time on their hands, but supported by power players. Both Ends Burning with adoption industry chicanarists (Gladney, Bruckner, JCICS. Bethany, European Adoption Consultants, ) political finaglers (Mary Landreiu, Michele Bachmann, CCAI, Jim Inhofe ) and soul harvesting “christians” (Christian Orphan Alliance, Focus on the Family, Saddleback Church) are up front and behind the wheel, through their CHIFF Act (Children and Families First 2013) in Congress. (See Pound Pup’s analysis here.)They don’t even pretend to care about orphan care or family preservation or microloans or direct financial aide to orphanages, schools, and families, or in-country adoption, or any other non-governmental programs to aide families.to keep them together. They certainly don’t care about best practice.
BEBers can’t bother to hide their contempt for the Hague Convention and the laws and policies of the US and other countries that at least give a modicum of protection to children at risk on their home ground. They attack genuine orphan and ethical care programs sponsored by UNICEF and Children’s Villages as harmful (and anti-adoption) for working to keep children in their own language, culture, and families whenever possible. For Americentric BEBers, adoption to American strangers is the first and best option.
BEB can’t be bothered to reach out to domestic and international adoptee rights activists and organizations who in real life have been “touched by adoption” as these yobbers like to say These bright eyed global adoptionists couldn’t’ care less about what domestic and international adoptees who were saved from “something” think about steam shoveling the world’s “orphans” into the US market. We’re just ungrateful misfits..
In fact, Orphan, Inc. has done everything in their power to ignore us. Those of us in the anti-CHIFF movement in which BEB plays large, for instance, have had our civilly written- comments removed and are blocked from posting on the CHIFF FB page. And, oh! dear, Bastardette herself is blocked from following CHIFF’s tweets directly, though I can go look at them (and FB) any time I please.If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it fall?
I’m not convinced that BEB and its :”orphan” comrades will make much headway in Washington. BEB has big money and pols behind it, but how much does it know about ow WDC works (even with its paid wonks and bed buddies)? Michele Bachmann??? Come on! Nor do they know much about adoption politics.I’tysnot like adoption is at the top of the Capitol heap. Hopefully, they’ll be sent packing in a couple years.. Whatever happens, though, I’d not be surprised if BEB & Friends move inward and align itself with racist anti-Indian groups such as Christian Alliance for Indian Child Welfare,Coalition for the Protection of Indian Children and Families, and Citizens Equal Rights Alliance as they attempt to dismantle ICWA. Remember, if you oppose international adoption and the expropriation of culture and families, you’re the one who’s racist, not the neo-colonialists.
BEB’s mission (and CHIFF) should be a wake-up call to everyone, including the most mild-mannered adoption reformists, to armor up and fight. for what little adoption ethics and transparency we have. If US adoption practice can get worse, the BEBes will do it,
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