1984 CALIFORNIA STYLE – NOTE

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I spent the entire weekend with a throbbing jaw and head and had emergency dental surgery yesterday. So, I’ve been out of it. I still am. I’m writing a short note, though, to send you to others, who are covering CARE’s latest shenanigans and re-write of history. I should have something up tomorrow. CARE has written and distributed the biggest fantasy since Bill Pierce’s hallucinogenic Factbook 3. According to CARE, the adoptee rights movement: is a direct result of medical professionals and social workers recognizing that hiding an authentic identity from an adoptee for an entire lifetime is neither healthy nor necessary. This doesn’t even rank as good revisionist history. Please go to: BB ChurchBaby Love Childand CARE updatesitself to read their own words.

ILLINOIS: FEIGENHOLTZ FLOPS IN 5TH:

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Yesterday Illinois State Representative and adoptee rights obstructionist Rep. Sara Feigenholtz lost her bid for Rahm Emmanuel’s 5th District Congressional seat. In a low turn-out special Democratic primary, Feigenholtz, considered by some to be the front runner, scored third in a field of 12 candidates. Our Sara lost to Cook County Commissioner and reformer Mike Quigley. While Feigenholtz and her followers like to think of her as “progressive” (she was endorsed by the National Organization for Women, Emily’s List, Equality Illinois, and SEIU), since the Obama victory in November she’s been demoted to old school Dem. She’s no Obama though she plays one. (Neither is Obama, but I’ll save that for another day!) And it didn’t help that she went negative on old friend Quigley. For those who care about these things, here’s a ward breakdown of the votes. Last night, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Carol Marin wrote of the voter rebellion In a district the Machine has controlled since 1958 — except for two aberrant years — with congressmen named Rostenkowski, Blagojevich and Emanuel, the 5th was the ultimate insider’s seat. What exactly did an outsider like Quigley have that would change that? Voter rebellion. After a presidential campaign that Continue Reading →

TENNESSEE: REP. DEBERRY TO PUBLIC: MEET ME BEHIND CLOSED DOORS. REFUSES TO DISCUSS PROPOSED GAY ADOPTION BAN IN PUBLIC

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Senator Beauregard Claghorn, the real deal. We all know about adoption and child welfare secrecy: sealed birth recordsanonymous adopteesanonymous first parentsanonymous adoptive parentsanonymous foster parentsstate confiscated identitiesforged government documentsclosed juvenile court hearingssealed juvenile court recordsanonymous tips to CPSsecret adoptionsLate Discovery adoptteesanonymous state-promoted child abandonment baby dump laws And just when you think it can’t get any more secret, we have Rep. John J. DeBerry, Jr, and Sen. Paul Stanley who don’t think it’s the media’s business why they’ve introduced restrictive adoption bills (HB 605 and SB 78) in the Tennessee legislature. The companion bills ( I can’t find the texts, only the summaries) ban unwed cohabiting couples from adopting. Who this really means, of course, is gays and lesbians. “Those people” never come up in the bills’ language, though, except for a passing reference to Tennessee’s constitutional amendment that defines marriage as between a man and a woman. Last year these same Junior Claghorns introduced a more strict gay and lesbian ban. Go here for background. Most Tennesseans thought the issue died after an October 2007 ruling by the state Attorney General that there was no legal basis in state law to ban gay couples from adopting. For reasons apparent Continue Reading →

BLOG ALERT : 73 ADOPTEE TAKES DOWN DEFORMERS

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The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity….Andre Gide 73adoptee, has a very important blog today: Compromise Legislation: Why Some Adoptees and Not Others? In fact, it is one of the most important adoptablogs I’ve ever read. If you are on the bastard battlefield, this is something to read, print out, and carry with you. Let it become part of you. Why Some Adoptees And Not Others? goes to the core of our current mess: the bastardization of bastards…by our so-called friends. 73adoptee tears the foundation out from under adopta deformers, who in their rat race to the legislature to get any piececrap law passed on their watch– tramp over the interests and rights of Joe and Jane Bastard. You know, class traitors like CARE (California) ABC (Massachusetts) and Illinois Feigenholtz do-bees. What happens when they get left behind on their own device never seems to cross their minds. Here’s a snip: Isn’t that what conditional legislation does? Pits adoptees against one another, turns us (again!) into guinea pigs racing on the experimental wheel of adoption. The facts of our origins are dangled like tasty tidbits if we only sell Continue Reading →

THE ADOPTION INDUSTRY CONTINUTES TO EAT ITSELF: LOS NINOS SHUTS DOWN

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I wasn’t expecting this one, but maybe I’m out of the loop! National Council for Adoption member Los Ninos International Adoption Center is no more as of March 31,2009. Unlike many agencies that have closed their doors recently, with little or no notice, this appears to be an orderly shutdown, but the only information I can find is off the Los Ninos webpage itself. Executive Director Rosana N. Erichsen, writes: The Board determined that Los Niños can no longer continue its charitable adoption activities because it is extremely difficult to meet our client’s adoption goals now that the rules governing new applicants have become so stringent and numerous countries have closed their international adoption programs. The Board believes it is in the best interest of Los Niños and its clients to dissolve Los Niños. The Texas-based Los Ninos has been around since 1981. It is a 2007 inductee into NCFA’s Hall of Fame. Besides the Los Ninos webpage you can read more about them here. I don’t know much about Los Ninos so I won’t comment. only to say that it appears the Hague, adoption scandal blowback, and the economy has done them in. ChompChomp! I wonder if the age Continue Reading →

CALOPEN’S NO VETO RESOLUTION

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In case you missed it, here is California Open’s No Veto Resolution. Please join CalOpen. It won’t cost you a dime or your dignity! OUR PROMISE TO YOU WE LEAVE NO ONE BEHIND! NO SELL-OUT! NO RESTRICTION! NO COMPROMISE! CAL OPEN’S NO VETO RESOLUTION WHEREAS we recognize that disclosure and contact vetoes, mandatory intermediaries and registry provisions are an affront to the dignity of adopted persons in California and a violation of their right to due process and equal treatment under the law, WHEREAS there has been a demonstrable negative effect on the ability to pass unconditional open records in other states that have passed veto legislation and/or any provisions that are less than unconditional access on demand by the adult adoptee, WHEREAS our primary goal is to restore the unrestricted right of adult adoptees in California to be treated as equal citizens under the law, WE HEREBY DECLARE that under no circumstances will we accept the addition of a disclosure veto, contact veto, intermediary or registry provisions, or any conditional provision to our legislation that would be less than unconditional access for adult adoptees to the original record of their birth. All legislative authors, sponsors, members, and coalition partners Continue Reading →

CALIFORNIA: I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE! BAD BILL HITS THE BOARDS!

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CARE’s baited breath “want and desire bill, “AB 372, was introduced in the California Legislature on February 23. Sen. Fiona Ma is the sponsor. CARE has not disappointed us, bringing forward a bad bill. No, excuse me. I’m wrong. Not bad. Atrocious. OVER UNDER SIDEWAYS DOWNThough advertised as an “open records bill,” as written now, it will do nothing to restore the right of Cal adoptees to their own birth records. It will, in fact, if passed, probably make it more difficult to retrieve an obc than it already is. To assure us illiterates (and I bet that includes its own members who hit the roof when they saw the bill), that we just don’t “understand” what the bill really says, CARE posted a disclaimer on its website a few hours ago: (a word about reading a bill: Legislative language, and the language of statutes, can be confusing. The language is based upon existing legal code which encompasses thousands of pages that are all interrelated. The chane that we are requesting will allow adult adoptees over the page of 18 access to their original record of birth. The text herein is written by the legislative counsel for the California Assembly Continue Reading →

SWAPMEETIN’: NCFA, REFORMISTS, AND BASTARDS

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Last week, the National Council for Adoption published its latest issue of Adoption Advocate: “Mutual Consent: Balancing the Birthparents Right to Privacy with the Adopted Person’s Desire to Know. The article (it is not a “report”) appears to be a better-late-than-never response to the November 2007 Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute report, For the Records: Restoring a Legal Right for Adult Adoptees, a document as activist, as say, the phone book. The fuss Mutual Consent has caused in AdoptionLaLaLand is as perplexing as why in the name of St. Jerome Emiliani NCFA waited so long to repsond…or why. It’s not exactly new news that NCFA promotes sealed records. NCFA was founded in 1980 specifically to fight the Carter initiative to open records on a federal level. Although NCFA in the last couple years has put on a happy face and begun to move to the center, (no more 5 signature registry! no more dour proclamations about open adoption or “spoiled adoptees”),it continues to oppose the unsealing of records without rigmarole worthy of a Soviet propiska. That doesn’t mean that Mutual Consent isn’t worthy of comment. But there is no need to legitimate Mutual Consent by making a big deal about Continue Reading →

MOST EGREGIOUS ADOPTION QUOTE OF 2009 (SO FAR)

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Ever hear of Dr. Ray? Me neither. But according to The Canton Repository, psychologist Ray Guarendi is not only my homie, but the purveyor of two syndicated radio talk shows, “The Doctor is In,” and “On Call With Dr. Ray and Friends”…and a Kid Kollector. He and his wife Randi have adopted 10 kids, mostly black, Hispanic, or biracial. Recently Dr. Ray published a Q & A adoption book, Adoption: Choosing it, Living it, Loving It. I haven’t read the book so I won’t get into its merits–or demerits. But what about all those kids? A question he says everybody asks him. Here’s his reply: I tell people it’s like eating potato chips; you can’t eat just one,” Guarendi said with a laugh. “We found we were liking parenting. Age is the reason we stopped.”

MORE THOUGHTS ON THE COMING CALIFORNIA FIASCO

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There are a lot of problems with CARE’s proposed access bill in California: elitism, compromise, rejection of rights and grassroots, and its decision to go for a bill in the midst of California’s economic dissolution.After several comments posted in my earlier blog entry regarding the so-called constitutionality issue in records access in California, I intended to a make relatively short comment, but decided that topic and some other thoughts really need a separate entry. Below I discuss the constitutionality issue and make a couple observations on the coming California Fiasco. This is not meant to be a definitive response. My comments are mine only, and do not represent CalOpen, which is perfectly capable of taking care of business itself. WHY DOES CARE BELIEVE THAT AN UNRESTRICTED ACCESS BILL WON’T FLY?The California Adoption Reform Effort (CARE) has shown little inclination to learn the history of past California records access campaigns, organize California adoptees outside the Amen Corner, build long-term relationships with leggies, or learn the lay of the Cal legislature, even with their pricey navigator…er… I mean lobbyist… at the helm. Judging from CARE’s past disinterest in constitutional studies (see BB Church) and its recent lame de facto attempt to acquire Continue Reading →