Adoption Porn 2022: A Few Thoughts on Media and the Public

National Adoption Day and its hooha, of course, is never really about children, Or for that matter, their bio or adoptive parents unless they fit into a joint media-framed adoption industry narrative. You’ll never see a news story about any of those parties talking about the tragic situation that brought them all to the point of adoption. I believe, in fact, that America’s attitude toward adoption and adoptees is media driven. Continue Reading →

Unhinged. My Life as a Right-Wing Nut Gatherer. A Short Memoir.

This ramped up eventually to oppositional research and hanging with Central Ohio abortion obsessives like masculinist Dave Daubenmire (Pass the Salt and Minute Men– not to be confused with the Minutemen), Dr. Patrick Johnston,(old link but you’ll get the idea), and Mark Harrington, “the Truth Truck Guy.” (Created Equal and other organizations.) During a chilly November afternoon, sitting on a wall by the Scioto River with Johnston and Troy Newman (Operation Rescue) I watched with great amusement as Johnston beat Newman repeatedly over the head with his Bible. I once got in a prayer huddle at the Ohio Statehouse with Janet Folger Porter, creator of Ohio’s original Heartbeat Bill. A couple of years later, Flip Benham, then director of Operation Rescue/Operation Save America, told me I nearly made him flub his prayer during a fetal funeral held by Fr. Frank Pavone (Priests for Life) in downtown Columbus when I heckled him with a line about a donkey and an embalmed fetus. It loses something without context. I’ll forgo it, but he got it. Continue Reading →

Thanksgiving 2022: Synoptic Comments on Overeating, Family History, and William Burroughs

I planned originally to post a list of sorts: things and people I am thankful for, so I could bypass the settler-colonial dialogue. My own family was just that starting in 1632. A few years later, one of them was a magistrate in Stratford, Connecticut, He hanged a “witch,” Goody Basset. I can’t find a reference on this right now, but one of the charges against her was ownership of a ladder Continue Reading →

Things to Think About. “Adoption and Culture” Pre-Publication Articles on Adoption, Abortion, Reproductive Justice, Dobbs

Dobbs certainly impacts the restoration of adoptee rights to records, history, family, and identity. It establishes a state-backed pattern of purposeful creation and growth of an adopted class without normal identity rights and maintains the spurious ethics of adoption secrecy. It promotes the commercialization of child adoptee bodies and attempts to invent adult adoptee gratitude and adherence to adoption and its institutions. Should we expect a big boom in therapy in 20 years? These are things we need to think about: Continue Reading →

Safe Haven Baby Boxes, Inc Says It’s “Unfortunate” It Can’t Control the Adoption Process of their Boxed Babies

MEOW!!!!!! The baby box company is NOT in the child placing business, nor should it be. It is not an adoption agency. It is not an adoption law firm. It does not include a licensed social worker on staff. It does not perform home studies. What in the world would qualify it for such a serious task? Continue Reading →

Sunday–Another Goose Egg

Anyway, I knew what I was going to write about–a response to comments posted on a certain political enemy’s Facebook page. My response was pretty short and simple but would qualify as a blog post. I went over to the FB page, cut and pasted what I needed, and wrote. It didn’t take long. An hour or so later I returned to FB to get the link and–guess what! The post was gone. Continue Reading →

No, I am not Leaving Twitter…

Maybe someday I’ll write a little memoir about the good old tough-and-tumble days on the alt hierarchies in the 1990s. No moderation, no control. Trolling was a fine art. Jobs were lost, marriages destroyed, cops were called. alt.adoption was called the “meanest newsgroup in town. We didn’t take prisoner, and it’s where Bastard Nation and the 2nd wave of the adoptee rights movement was born. Continue Reading →