Though, I’ve been writing about John McCain’s adoption problem, (see previous entry) I did not intend to leave Barack Obama off the hook.
Obama, too, warmed to Rick Warren’s suggestion of a PEPFAR plan to “rescue” by adoption 148 million so-called orphans ’round the world. His comments below, in conjunction with his earlier stated belief in Jesus as his redeemer,is code for his willingness to open up adoption (more than it already is!) to a globalist evangelical-government partnership.
From the CNN transcript:
WARREN: OK. This one is dear to my heart. Most people don’t know that there are 148 million orphans in the world. 148 million kids growing up without mommies and dads. They don’t need to be in an orphanage. They need to be in families. But a lot of families can’t afford to take these kids in. Would you be willing to consider and even commit to doing some kind of emergency plan for orphans, like President Bush did with AIDS, almost a president’s emergency plan for orphans, to deal with this issue?
OBAMA: I cheated a little bit. I actually looked at this idea ahead of time, and I think it is a great idea. I think it’s something that we should sit down and figure out, working between non-governmental organizations, you know, national institutions, the U.S. government and try to figure out what can we do. I think that part of our plan, though, has to be, how do we prevent more orphans in the first place, and that means that we’re helping to build a public health infrastructure around the world, that we are, you know, building on the great work that you, and by the way, this president has done when it comes to AIDS funding around the world. I think it helps. I’m often a critic of President Bush, but I think the PETFAR [sic] program has saved lives and has done very good work and he deserves enormous credit for that.
Obama has no personal adoption baggage or scandal–that we know of–but like McCain, he has no problem pandering to the christo-socialist adoption agenda and its money-grubbing child redistribution agencies. The US government has no business funding mis-named “faith based” programs of any type, and certainly not those that seek movement and church growth through adopta-evangelization.
Adoption “reformers” need to put both these jokers on notice.
Marley,
Curious who are these Adoption “reformers”?
There is a place on Mr. Obama’s website where you can place a message that states your concern. Several of us Moms have already done that, and, should he receive a lot of these comments, he would have to take a look because we are the ones that will elect him if he wins. Of course, I will vote for anyone before I vote for the Adopter and the Holy-Roller. Obama gets my vote.
Marley
Do you have any suggestions on how anyone can help the 148 million orphans in the world?
It is such a huge number and help is long past due.
If you were to be in charge of coming up with a sollution where would you begin?
what would work the quickest to help the true orphans?
please considering posting your thoughts so all can see.
First define “orphan.”
Then tell me what business the US government has the condition of children in other countries (unless they are US citizens), and why the US has the “right to intervene.
kids are suffering all over the world. parents are dead or they have been abandoned or parental rights terminated for neglect and abuse. these are what I mean by orphaned. I don’t mean kids who have been ripped away illegally. let’s just take the kids in the US who get stuck in the screwed up system. what would work better? how would we start? its a mess!
Well, it could be a mess because there is the foster to adopt factor, adopters only seem to want cute, little womb-fresh infants and toddlers and even our social service agencies go where the money is.
A lot of foster caregivers are in it for either the money, a halo or they want a bay-beeee. The truly child-centered ones are overloaded.
Sometimes I think well-run, well funded orphanages are needed. The bad ones gave the good ones a really bad rep. It’s not all like what you see when you watch “Annie.” I visited a Methodist orphanage in SC at Christmas, back in the early 70s, and I saw a lot of healthy, happy children.
One of the housemothers was a girl of 19 who was staying on while she went to college and working there because she just didn’t want to leave her “family.” She had a lapful of excited, wiggly kindergarten-aged kids when we came in. Of course, the staff was thoroughly screened and the institution was well-funded.
It’s all in the perspective of what we have grown to see as sweet, warm and fuzzy and how Oliver Twist still skews our perception of orphanages.
As for the US, we need to be working for family reunification for the bulk of kids in foster care. Too many are snatched by the DSS for less than good reasons.
I agree, Robin, the foster care system is a mess, and small, well-supervised intitutional care might not be such a terrible thing for kids in need of long-term care. It is pretty clear that private-home foster care is a disaster on many levels, and that state child welfare agencies are not doing a good job for anyone, especially not the kids.
While adoption may be the answer for some kids in foster care and some kids around the world who truly have nobody. it should be the last resort, not the first, and it can only be a bandaid on a huge problem, even if everyone who wants to adopt and is fit gets a kid. The answer is NOT fast track adoptions and handing out hard-to-place kids to virtually anyone who will take them with few questions asked. Adoption should NOT be made easier, it should be more rigorous to assure the best homes for those children who do need to be adopted.
One area that can be vastly improved is stability for kids in any kind of care…..keep them in one decent, loving secure place, don’t move them around and back and forth arbitrarily. If the biological family really can’t get it together and the kids keep going back into state care, put them in one place with some permanence and keep contact with relatives without being shifted back and forth.
Help is needed all over the world for families in poverty to help them stay together and stay healthy. Again, separation and children going into care should be a last resort, and is certainly not the best solution for a complex problem.
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I think that people just aren’t creative enough.
There are clearly families where the parents just don’t have it together enough to effectively parent their kids. But they love their kids, the kids love them, bonds are there, and breaking them through termination of parental rights is only going to compound things.
Why not look to a co-housing model that would allow these families to live in semi-private homes with parenting mentors? The family gets services and a real-world education on how to effectively parent. The kids get stability and care. Less burden on the system, and kids don’t get taken from their families.
I really do think that such a program would have helped to prevent the tragic death of Candace Newmaker.
Lainie, that is one solution and not a bad one. It could work, I think.I think that a lot of parents just need intensive instructions and to learn coping skills.
Another alternative is legal guardianship where there is no pretense about parenthood. Guardians could be trained and this would truly be child-centered because the factor of the adult’s “need” would be out of the picture. Good role models and stable homes can be provided without an assumption of parental roles.
I think some form of special guardianship, such as exists in the UK, would be valuable, especially in cases of older children who want to keep contact with their families, or for those who are in long term foster care (possibly bounced around from carer to carer) or are being cared for on a regular basis by members of extended family. However, I don’t think it’s an answer for every situation. But then, what is ?
I see a difficulty with aiming for NO assumption of any kind of parental role in guardianship. What constitutes a “parental role” ? Presumably a guardian is expected to perform many of the actions and activities normally assigned to or required or expected of a parent, as well as to fulfill certain ‘parental’ obligations.
Of course I agree it shouldn’t include any sort of pretense that the relationship is biological, but I think it would be impossible – as well as undesirable – to screen out all feelings consistent with parental affection, or to expect a child not to respond emotionally to a caring ‘caretaker’ as it might to a devoted parent.
Who would want to become a guardian on such chilling terms?
I really like Lainie’s suggestion. It makes so much sense, and would help a lot of families to stay together. There really isn’t enough thinking outside the box. Of course I’m somewhat cynical as to why this is so (partly, I think, because it doesn’t bring in the moolah – or the souls).
However, as Maryanne says, the problem is a complex one. One thing we all agree on is that separating children from their families should be a last resort. The casualness with which the American public approaches something so drastic is mind boggling.
All good comments, Kippa. I think Guardianship would work in the situations you mentioned but I too was bothered by this statement by Robin: “Good role models and stable homes can be provided without an assumption of parental roles.”
Full-time caregivers, whether foster, adoptive, guardians, or relatives have to “assume parental roles”. That is, they have to perform the day to day tasks of parenting that the natural parents are unable to perform, for whatever reason. No, they should not pretend to be biologically related if they are not, nor should they wipe out the child’s connection with biological kin, but they certainly can and must assume the role of psychological parenting for those children whose biological parents cannot take responsibility and day to day care of them. I am not talking about coerced infant surrenders here, but the more complex situations of kids who natural parents REALLY can’t take care of them, long-term.
Children need to have deep emotional bonds with their long-term caretakers, and it needs to go both ways. Those doing the parenting need to feel they ARE parents. Anything less than that leaves kids with nobody in the “parenting role”, no matter how much they may love their biological parents despite their inability to parent.