MASSACHUSETTS: CLAUDIA CONTRADA–YOU ARE ONE OF US!

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I don’t have much time to write on this at the moment, but I want to refer you to Fetch Me My Axe’s latest blog about Acton (Massachusetts) High School TRA lesbian Claudia Contrada and her untenable situation with the amommie from hell who just happens to “staff” at the local anti-queer cell, Article 8 Alliance, and reportedly schmoozes with the Fred Phelps gang. The adopter, Amy Contrada, says that Claudia, despite her claims to the contrary, is not a lesbian at all. According to the elder Contrada, Claudia is simply the confused victim of the Acton school system’s “homosexual agenda” that makes her think she is. Like her school’s current production of the acclaimed Laramie Project in which Claudia appeared before being yanked from school last week. QueerToday.com, the Boston Globe, and Salon’s World o Crap blogger (be sure to read this one, but be wared, it’s ugly!) have picked up on the story. In turn, Amy Contrada who blogs reportedly under the nom d plume “A Mann” for the Internet wingnut blog rag, MassResistance outs Claudia’s adoption and alleged psychological problems and learning disabilities which supposedly make her the perfect target for queer conversion. So much for privacy! Continue Reading →

THE BABY THIEF UPDATE: TOP 20 PICK!

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On November 6 Publisher’s Weekly announced it’s best picks of the year. For Top 20 Non-Fiction–you guessed it–The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption by Barbara Raymond. “A rigorous page-turner.” And is Barbara ever in grand company: Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson (The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944), Jonathan Gould (Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America), Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism), Milan Kundera (The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts); and Studs Terkel (Touch and Go: A Memoir). Allow me to exclaim a great big WOW! Bastardette can only imagine how Barbara is taking this! If you have not yet read The Baby Thief, DO IT NOW! Buy an extra copy for your local public or university library. Donate a copy to a nearby law school. Give them to your family and friends this holiday. The Baby Thief makes sealed adoption records radio active! Use what’s in the book to take back your records! This is our story! (Photo by Bastardette. Fred Greenman and Barbara Raymond, AAC, March 2007)

WOMB WORSHIPPING: NEW MEANING FOR "DUMB BASTARDS" AND THEIR MOMS

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Maybe you’ve seen this. It’s making its way around adoption forums. But for those who have missed it, check out Rebecca Marina’s How to Get Your Baby Quicker. (Click before reading further!) This is not The Onion. This is serious stuff. This is about “visioning” the baybee YOU want.” Perhaps “visioning” a ’68 Mustang or a Mediterranean villa will substitute for those of us who wish to remain baybeeless. Or in the case of bastards, their obcs. If this were just about acquisional “visioning” I’d ignore it. Been there. Done that. But this site is weird. It sucks you in like an Orek infomercial. Especially “What About the Birthmother” where we are told: Remember this, your baby may come through another womb to get to you and your baby LOVES that womb and chose that women to bear them. it is important to bless and honor the womb that brings you your baby…your baby sure does…. The babies tell me it is vital that someone who is waiting for adoption release completely all judgment of the woman whatever her reasons are. MS REBECCA GIVES THE TERM ‘DUMB BASTARD’ A WHOLE NEW MEANINGDoes this mean that bastards are like those people Continue Reading →

GUEST BLOGGER KEVAN TAYLOR-PERRY: CONFIDENTIALLY YOURS – PART 2 (THE CALIFORNIA CI SYSTEM)

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Kevan and his brother continue to be State Biohazards. Here is Part 2: Well, I just got off the phone with the illustrious Don Mencarini up at the Kids-4-Less sales office. Don runs the Adoptions Support Unit at the SS in California. (Yes, interesting how Social Services has those initials, what? Why not, though? Do a web search for “Lebensborn”…) He’s also the CI in my sibling contact nightmare. I decided to try and get some closure from my foolish participation in the new California Lame-O Law (Leno Law) for adoptee sibling contact. I asked Don if he bothered to tell my brother that I am also adopted and our birth mother didn’t raise us. See, Don has been trying since July to get my brother to send in the Waiver of Rights to Confidentiality the state requires in this bullshit CI system. So he says. My brother has been saying he’s sending it and never does. So I told Don, look, he was adopted when he was two and he’s older than I. Maybe he thinks, “Mom KEPT him but not ME?! Fuck him! I’ll just drag this out and see how HE likes feeling like this!” Well, no, Continue Reading →

GUEST BLOGGER KEVAN TAYLOR-PERRY: CONFIDENTIALLY YOURS (THE CALIFORNIA CI SYSTEM)

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Well, I hold the rather dubious honor of being the very first sucker, er, customer (perhaps?) of the new California “Leno Law” to facilitate adoptee sibling contact through a Confidential Intermediary. Let me also be the first sucker who fell for this swindle to state this law isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. I suppose Assemblymember Leno can rest his little head at night thinking he has accomplished some noble deed for which we all ought to be grateful. In fact, the law is a mere frippery, another scam designed to try and remove the rather gale-force wind from gathering in the sails of adoptees who see this charade for what it is. More “I feel good, applaud me” crap from Sacramento that one supposes is applauded by the daytime talk show kleenex-wielders who love happy endings but would rather not hear the truth. The truth is, this law was flawed from the start. I know because I’m the first dumbass taken in by the carnival hucksters up at CalState DSS-ASU who promoted this swindle as if they thought of it themselves. Which any sane person would know cannot be true because none of those clowns have ever had Continue Reading →

MASSACHUSETTS: QUESTIONS TO THE LEGISLATURE — PLEASE ADD YOUR OWN

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NOTE: This is a corrected version of the blog I published last night. Christina is not a high school student (not sure why I thought she was! ) but a college student in Florida. My apologies go her). College student Christina Cross-Parkhurst, is asking some interesting questions about the new Massachusetts “records access” law. See, deformers and their Beacon Hill hacks tossed an entire generation of the state’s adoptees, who made the mistake of being born at the wrong time, into a black hole, denying them access to the birth records, while letting those born at the politically correct times “permission” to own theirs. For a school project, she’s asking why. The questions that she asks are some of the questions we’ve asked for months to no avail of legislators and the Benedict Bastards of the ABC Committee who took it upon themselves to decide who deserves identity rights and who doesn’t. (Daily Bastardette, Sept. 9, 2007 for bill signing). I don’t know if Christina intends to take this outside the classroom. It would be fun, though, to send them to Sen. Karen Spilka who gutted the original clean bill; Susan Hicks and the ABC Committee who licked Spilka’s spike Continue Reading →

CATCHING UP FROM THE CONS

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I’m working on a couple of blogs, but in the meantime, I’m sending out 3 short catch-ups to light up your life, give you hope to carry on and fill your nights with…well, whatever. OLD FRIEND–NEW BLOGPlease check out Baby Love Child, a brand new blog that went up today: Starting in the Middle. The author, Lauren Sabina Kneisly, is a very old and dear friend of mine. She appeared here as a guest blogger last year with “Stem-Cell Veto, Snowflake Kids, and Christian Eugenics” (July 29, 2006). She’ll be kicking it up writing cutting edge analysis of AdoptionLand. Here’s a sample:Yes, the personal IS political, (but not universal!) but did that really mean I had to end up neck deep in working on adoption? I mean, the language is completely broken, the power disparities are massive and overwhelming. International child marketing and redistribution is almost too much to wrap one’s brain around. Add in reproductive technologies both emergent and old, and it’s enough to give a Bastard a migraine! (And I haven’t even gotten to why I use the word Bastard yet!) …. SPEAKING OF LOVE CHILD!Here’s an interesting piece, A Double History of the Supreme’s “Love Child” from Continue Reading →

ETHICS CONFERENCE: BASTARDETTE LEAVES NO ONE BEHIND AND SMASHES THE TRIAD IN THE PROCESS

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As one of the “official bloggers” at the Ethics and Accountability conference in Arlington, VA today and tomorrow, I need to send dispatches to the adoption-deficient. I’m really tired and will post more tomorrow probably, but what better, or easier thing to blog about than…Bastardette herself! Below is my 10 minute presentation. Do you have any idea how hard it is to craft a 10 minute presentation? Not that you care, so I won’t get into the pain of snipping away cleaverisms and to stick to the bare bones message. At the left is a picture of my panel, “Adoption Access to Records and History Adopted People and the “Right to Know.” Fred Greenman, General Counsel, American Adoption Congress; Pam Hasegawa, moderator, Trish Maskew, president of Ethica (not on panel), Bastardette, Elizabeth Sammuels, professor of law, U. of Baltimore and records access legal scholar). * * * * * * INTRODUCTION There are a number of reasons why the original birth certificates of adoptees remain sealed in all but a handful of states. Well-funded adoption industry lobbies such as the National Council for Adoption; powerful tangential lobbies such as the National Right to Life Committee, the Family Research Council, the Continue Reading →

ASAIK: ADOPTION MEMOIRISTS– "HOW COULD YOU CHOOSE MY BIRTHRIGHT FOR ME?"

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Lorainne Dusky (standing); Jean Strauss, Emily Hipchen, Carol Schaefer The ASAIK conference (Association for the Study of Adoption, Kinship, and Identity) is Bastardette’s absolutely favorite adoption conference! The event 2 years ago in Tampa was fun (yes academics can be–and do–have fun!) and crucial to my understanding of the warp and woof of adoption politics beyond hum-drum “activism.” Literature, art, rhetorical constructions, history, cultural studies, and philosophy give an authentic voice to adoption’s actors. They expose the profound problems of identity loss, state-built identity, psychological repression, and otherness–illogics that go far beyond adoption industry manipulation and power politics, and into the very heart of what makes adoption absurd. Daniel Deronda is not far removed from sealed records. “How could you choose my birthright for me?”Today’s first session, “Memoirs, Classic and New,” was a bang-up with authors Lorraine Dusky, Jean Strauss, Carol Schaefer and Emily Hipchen discussing their adoption experience, the process of memoir writing, and reading excerpts from their books. BJ Lifton, unfortunately could not make it due to illness. All of the panelists pointed out that they were writing about a subject that until recently was supposed to be stuffed away in the back closet like an ugly cloth Continue Reading →

ETHICS AND ACCOUNTABILITY CONFERENCE: MEET AND GREET THE BLOGGERS:

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As I wrote previously, on October 15 I’ll be part of the informal Meet the Bloggers panel and cocktail reception at the upcoming Adoption Ethics and Accountability conference in Arlington, VA. When I began blogging 2 1/2 years ago there were only a handful of us. Now cyberspace is over-run with snoopy, mouthy, dissatisfied adoption victims and consumers sticking the feet of The Masters of Adoption not only to the fire, but in the fire. Adoptabloggers should be proud to know that we are the only ones consistently speaking truth to industry power. You don’t expect adoption slavering MSM to, do you? Which reminds me…have you noticed that since the passing of Dr. Pierce the Axis of Evil doesn’t blog? But then they lack a certain grasp on reality. And…hmmm…. irony…and humor…and outrage. What in the world would they say anyway? “Give me your white, your middle class, your fuzzy-wuzzy illego baybees that we may cleanse them..and you…with the healing power of adoption? And while you’re being cleaned up, ignore those loud-mouthed bastards who think they have rights. The only right they have is the right to be grateful!” The beneficiaries of hierarchical largesse are always ungrateful. The line-up posted Continue Reading →