Bastardize your friends, family, and yourself at the Bastard Boutique!

The Bastard Boutique is now open for business.

After a long hiatus, Bastard Nation swag is once again avaiilable to the public. We have a large selection of Bastard Nation calendars, postcards, magnets and hard to come-by keyrings and jewelry. More swag is on the way. Here’s a sample: Continue Reading →

Goodbye National Adoption Month: I won’t miss you!

Well, I’m not sure if we conquered, but bastards and adoptees certainly held our own this National Adoption/National Adoption Awareness Month–the longest month of the year. Especially  long if you’re force-writing every day while tin horn blowers and tin hat wearers, shysters in 3-piece suits, flim-flamers,  do-gooders, Biblicalticians ,Grundys, neurotics, pschchotics, happy dappies, and woundies are all out to get you from one side or the other. Me thinks the whole world is crazy except me and thee; and sometimes I wonder about thee. Continue Reading →

Two More Angels Lose Their Wings: Angels in Adoption winners charged with child abuse

It’s getting to be a habit. Two more Angels in Adoption winners have fallen to earth with a big thud and are currently sitting in a well-deserved slammer.

Fox29 in Kansas City reports that Topeka City Councilman Jonathan Robert Schumm, 34, and his wife Allison Nicole Schumm, 32, were arrested last Thursday (Thanksgiving) and charged child abuse and aggravated battery. Continue Reading →

The B List: Bastardette’s Adoption Playlist

Writer Suzanne Gilbert (Tapioca Fire) posted her playlist of adoption search and reunion songs on Facebook today and asked if anyone else had their own. Looking around tonight for something to write about, I thought I’d glom off her idea. My songs, though, aren’t particularly about search and reunion but about adoption in general–how I’ve thought about and reacted to adoption over the last four decades. What affected me once, doesn’t necessarily affect me now, but when I hear it I think: a-ha adoption! Continue Reading →

Bastard Nation Bedtime Stories: #flippingthe script on the adoptee narrative

One of the greatest tools we have in adoptee rights today is ridicule: satire, parody, and humor. Unfortunately many adoptees fail to see humor in their situation. Spending $20,000 and 20 years of your life to find out where you came from is enough to take the edge off. Continue Reading →

I Want a Pony! Vermin Supreme for President!

Next to sealed birth certificates, pony deprivation is the most serious problem adoptees face today. Placing us for adoption in the belief that we would be reared in a home with a pony which they couldn’t provide, birthparents have been shocked, to learn that forever families did not, in fact, come automatically equipped with the promised pony. Most adoptees, much to our (and our birthparents) dismay have been forced to live a pony-free life. We’re not happy about it.

2016 Presidential hopeful Vermin Supreme has stepped up to our plate promising to change that. He has formed the Free Pony Party (and on Facebook) and promises a government- subsidized pony for everyone in the United States. Continue Reading →

The Celebrity A List: Adopted, the not adopted, and the definition of adoption

Adopted celebrities or the adopted adult children of celebrities aren’t ever asked how they feel about being adopted or how they even view adoption in a general sense. Not even a crass, “Do you know who you real parents are?” Most definitely they are not asked if it’s OK for socio-political agendized organizations to queer their personal adoptee (or not adoptied as we shall see) narratives for themselves to fit whatever program they’re pimping. Celebrity adoptees are simply paper dolls for the adoption industry and a gullible public, meant to entertain and play with, not to care about. Certainly nobody is going to bring up the adopted children of celebrities who reject their adopters or whose adopters reject them or those who have otherwise depressing outcomes. How many of you know about Barabra Stanwyck’s shipped-off adopted son Tony Fay who once wrote an article for Confidential “Why does my mother hate me?” or Joan Fontaine’s possibly illegally adopted Peruvian daughter Marita (they reconciled after decades of estrangement) or Hedy Lamarr’s adopted/not adopted son James Lamarr Loder (think Loretta Young and click the link.) Christina Crawford is the only celebrity adoptee/adopted I can think of who dared to speak out, and you won’t see her paraded around by NAM. In the future no NAM pusher is going chat up Chelsea O’Donnell, though Rosie, no doubt will shoot her mouth off, for years much to the pleasure of her fanc about the ungrateful little bastard formerly known as her adoptee. Continue Reading →

Scandal 2015 and The Defenders 1962. Same subject, two different reactions

Unfortunately, Lila Rose and her ilk cannot treat Americans as adults like they were treated 54 years ago. They can’t take the heat for a serious discussion. Are their arguments so fragile that a TV show can crumble them? Moreover, they don’t want to admit that the only “big deal” about abortion for some women is trying to get through the maze of laws and restrictions people Lila Rose and Ryan Bomberger have either created or supported to make forced pregnancy the only “choice” some have. Continue Reading →

Scandal: The Radiance Foundation v Shonda Rhimes

I’m beginning to think that this should be Stop Radiance Foundation Month instead of National Adoption Month.  Not a day goes by when I don’t retch or laugh or both at what shows up on its FB page. It is not a safe space for Bastards. I mean, if you think the I Am Adopted FB page is full of happy adoptees who will transform you into a diabetic in 10 seconds with their pink cotton candy and kool-aid, (even if half of them seem really angry) then RF is totally blissed out on it. Did somebody over there indulge on Purple Owsley and never come back?  Forced pregnancy followed by happy relinquishment is the RF model.There’s no middle ground here.Unplanned pregnancy = abortion. The way RF propagandizes, you’d think no single women keep their kids. I’m not sure what one of RF: slogans “Be the Hope” means. Many adoptees have been acquired as the hope of childless couples (or singles, though  I doubt RF supports that part of the deal.) Does any normal person want to be someone else’s hope? Has Bomberger ever talked to one of those`adoptee hope survivors?  Don’t we, especially if we are adopted, have enough problems? Continue Reading →