T
he Children in Families First bill is is dry flopping fast.. The bill has no support in the State Departmentand little on Capitol Hill, This week it’s taken a hefty drubbing from opppoonents on the Internett. .Sponsor Sen. Mary Landrieu (R-LA), and her merry crew of adoption industrialists, christian orphan movementeers and incurious politicians can’t bring themselves to post the obit. Iinstead CHIFF, Inc is astroturfing endorements (Keilu Yaldo) and continuing to add new sponsors including proud and loud homophobe Rep. Alan Nunnelee (R-MS).
The latest CHIFF flap, though minor, involves me personally.and exemplifies the petty and amateur handling ofits “landmark” bill. and its “interested parties.” Oh, wait a minute! Excuse me! Adoptees CAN’T be an “interested party,” since no nobody from CHIFF, Inc asked us (or our birthers and adopters) what we thought of CHIFF much less invited us to their big people’s table for input. and pot roast. In fact, they have repeatedly barred us from sitting down, even at the childrens table. Mother Landrieu knows best.
But back to the latest CHIFF snubbery.
Thursday, Bastardette was blocked from posting on the CHIFF- pimping Children Deserve Families blog and from following blog author, Kaite Jay’s Twitter account.
For the uninitiated, Jay is the self-appointed Chief-CHIFF propagandist and BFF of Landreiu, Whitney Reitz, the putative author of CHIFF, and neolib Harvard law professor and Madonna fan Elizabeth Bartholet who never met an adoption she didn’t love or an adoptee outside of her own who isn’t ungrateful.Jay is so far out that she makes Bill Pierce look like Bastardette. She exemplifies just how whack adoption-policy making and politics has become since the good doctor’s passing. Just pick a random blog entry and fall head first into a dank Orwellian hole where adoption ethics is a bad word. and anyone who opposes CHIFF is anti-adoption, socialist, and apparently wants to see large numbers of children die.at the hands of UNICEF. I’m waiting for her to bring up UN Agenda 21, which according to a friend of mine, blueprints knocking off 80% of the world’s population be 2016 or thereabouts..
I have no idea why I’ve been singled out for banishment, when apparently others, chewing out equal or worse “criticism” (we are all polite) are still allowed the privilege of posting in her inner sanctum. In fact, up until Thursday (?) I shared that privilege. I’m not sure when my punishment was meted out since I didn’t receive notice timely.
Perhaps, it was Thursday’s call on FB and Twitter to come explore Jay’s blog, particularly an entry from last August, Birth Moms Deserve Choice. The misuse of the (to many) offensive term “birth mom” and her exburban consumerist sensibility aside, Katie Jay takes up the white woman’s burden to patiently to explain to us mundanes (to use Will Grigg’s wonderful term) why women in Third World countries are raring to “choose” to toss their children into the Western adoption mill, if only the nasty old US State Department didn’t stand in the way. She claims that if privileged white folks in the US don’t strong-arm Third World women of color out of their children we’re forcing them to parent children they don’t want or can’t care for.
According to Katie Jay, Third World poverty isn’t such a big deal either:
Opponents of international adoption like to imply that third world birth moms with adequate food and shelter would never voluntarily give up their children, and therefore we should focus all of our attention on poverty reduction programs. There are a couple big problems with this argument…
…it is fundamentally racist to presume that women in third world countries would behave differently from women in first world countries, given the same set of circumstances and opportunities. I don’t see opponents arguing against the reality that birth moms in first world countries put their children up for adoption. Therefore, what they are really arguing is that women in third world countries are fundamentally “different.” This viewpoint reminds me of the “Noble Savage” myth, in which “native” people are idealized to the point of fetishism
Who is fetishizing whom here?
I’ve never met anyone in AdoptionLand who noblizes,. idealizes or fetishizes anybody’s culture, even our own. Who I have met are countless transracial and international adoptees (not to mention white homegrown varieties ) who resent losing their original culture, language and family to the neo-colonial adoption money maw. They are empty of what and who they were supposed to be, often feel “strangers in strange land.” They are the best interpreters of post-colonial theory in regard to adoption I know. Jay needs to read Daniel ibn Zayd’s Transracial Eyes or Crunk Feminists..
I intended to write a serious detailed response to Jay’s absurd praise of “choice” and the rest of her privileged gibberish regarding adoption, and might still.
In the meantime, though, I wrote the following comment, which Jay has refused to post.. On the off-chance that I botched the post the first time, I attempted a re-post it in the evening to no avail .I’ve been blocked. A friend considers this a blessing! Here it is with a couple small changes:
There is nothing more entertainingly absurd than watching privileged white women (and men) claiming to speak for Women of Color both here and abroad.But, after all, you’re already claiming to speak for bastards and birthers–that is, adoptees and their first parents.
And then to move “socialism” on to the discourse! Oh dear!
US adoption practice is an amalgamation of the worst aspects of capitalism and socialism, I can think of nothing more “socialistic” and “capitalistic” than marauding one’s way into a have-not country, extracting that country’s children” and then redistributing them to elite worthies in have countries in exchange for a lot of money and profit. No doubt Trotsky and JP Morgan are clapping their hands in hell watching this play out.
International adoption is part of the larger globalist picture. Sorta the US outsourcing childbirth and citizenship. You make ’em. We take ’em. It’s the classic war between capital and labor. Only this time the product is children, not Nikes or Pink hoodies.
Others have asked the question “when is choice not a choice? “ Well, when it comes to adoption historically, it’s not. The term “choice” is a consumerist term for which we have liberal (not liberation) feminists to thank. “Choice” us a marketing term created by an ad agency shortly after Roe to “soften” the abortion message. (There was a big difference between feminists and pro-abortion activists, which is another story) That consumerist term has come back to gut abortion rights and bite a lot of other people now.
To argue “choice” in adoption is an insult to the many women who have had no choice domestically and internationally, Whether the issue is “you’re not bringing that little bastard home” or religious intolerance or debilitating poverty created by at-home and cross country Western neo-colonial policies. resource sucking, and misogyny, it comes down to no choice. Hint: Haiti once the gem of the New World is now the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere not because of an inability to create wealth but because of the tremendous “reparations demanded by France–not paid off until the 1920s or 1930s–for the Revolution nearly 150 years earlier.
Whether you like it or not, US families in international adoption are, in many cases, built on the backs of the miserable poor in other countries. The money spent on international adoption, as Shea points out, could be used to keep large number of families in tact. It could be used to start up female-operatefd micro-businesses. It could be used to support in-place and new orphanages and foster-care systems that keep families together and in their culture. With CHIFF, we again see those affected by adoption: adoptees, first parents, and the poor marginalized, while elites in Washington and in megachurches “speak” for us. Well, you and they don’t speak for us.
Go over to the blog and read other comments. They are stunning and strong, and right.
Interestingly, in the more than 20 years I’ve been online, I have only been “blocked” four times, and each of these blocks were made in the last few months by CHIFF authority figures who can dish it out, but can’t eat it. When the Chief-CHIFF propagandist stops the head of the largest adoptee civil rights organization in the country from civil discussion in CHIFF- forums, it’s clear that adoptees and our families don’t count.
Well, we do count, and that’s the problem.It’s only if we are silenced and invisible that we don’t according to CHIFF, Inc. Out of sight. Out of mind.
Bill Pierce and I had a famous relationship built on mutual respect and even trust. Our online and private correspondence runs into thousands of printed pages. He had little use for do-gooders, sectarians–and Angels of Adoption. I can’t help but think that if Dr. Adoption takes a few minutes from his eternal dialogue about adoption with God, that he’;; looking down on these second rate chislers and smirk. He loved the fight, as do I. CHIFFers prefer to hide behind their counterfeit gated humanitarianism.
I’ll post more tomorrow and this weekend on how you can help us stop CHIFF. Until then, join StopCHIFF on Facebook. Tonight we have approximately 2000 more “llikes” than does the CHIFF page!
Join me on Twitter@DBast
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Thank you.
Daniel ibn Zayd is one of my favorite theorists. He energizes, inspires and activates me. He responded to Katie Jay’s “choice” blog with the following. I’e linked to his blog in the body of my own blog. He’s probably given Jay stomach cramps for the next 2 weeks. Daniel writes:
“As a pyromaniac firefighter brandishing gasoline, you are very dangerous.
It might behoove you to know that the argument you make was also made by anti-abolitionists, namely, that releasing slaves into the general population was doing them a disservice; that they were “better off” on the plantation. That you might side on the wrong side of justice and morality for the sins of the society you live in is quite telling, and quite disturbing.
This of course brings us to the next point which is that you are egregiously mistaken in assuming that adoption historically is about family creation. Adoption stems historically speaking from indentured servitude, punishment of the poor, destruction of the Indigenous, the population needs of new colonies and thus colonialism, along with the racism/classism/and misogyny that goes with such ignoble ways of viewing fellow human beings.
That you might create an Orwellian inversion and describe this as “choice” for mothers targeted to lose their children is a disgusting and filthy lie. But you know this, so the only point in arguing this is for you to acknowledge all of the above and still, and still, put forth these arguments which are, in and of themselves, the very antithesis of what you claim they are. Adoption is a crime. Those who advocate for it are criminals.
From this point, the burden of proof is on you to prove that in the 100+ years that adoption has existed it has done anything to change any of the problems that you pretend to decry. Such tears from such crocodiles as yourself are really a waste of time for those of us activating for a better future for all to argue over. A 10% cut in the standard of living of prospective adopters would go much farther to save more children than adoption ever could. Why is this not an option?
The unheard families and communities of disinherited children are standing up to reclaim those children; adoptees are returning, rematriating to attempt to undo the damage those such as yourself wreak on this planet; mothers are coming out of their silence to denounce such coercive drivel. I dare you to truly advocate and activate on behalf of those you share the planet with. I dare you.”