In the Eye of the Storm: My Interview with the Weekly Standard. The enemy got it right.

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fterwards I fretted. In my weather-distracted state, what in the world did I tell the Weekly Standard? How stupid did I sound? I knew the writer was also interviewing Bill Pierce and he’d be probably call BN a bunch of ungrateful hippie commies. He once assucsed Bastard Nationals of wearing Birkenstocks. Bill was like that. How I miss those days! Maybe the writer thought I was tripping, with my talk green sky and flying tree limbs.

Much to my perverse pleasure the article came out (online and print) as hit piece, but the best article ever written about Bastard Nation and the adoptee rights movement up to that ptime. Every one of our points made it in. The hit piece was a hit. We forwarded it around. Hey, the Weekly Standard gets it, even if they don’t like us! Reading it again 13 years later, I still think that, despite a couple of small errors. BN has never promoted the movement as a medical history issue nor are we left-leaning. We are no-leaning. Continue Reading →

Gotcha Day: Turning the private into the public

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Wiki says that Gotcha Day comes from animal rescue/ pet adoption (just as “forever family.”) I don’t know when it began to refer to humans.

I first heard about Gocha around 15 years ago. I was immediately squicked. Gotcha sounds like trapping a rat under the stove or grabbing up the last flat screen TV on Black Friday at Wal-Mart. It’s a predatory term. A scary tern. A cheap term. A violent term. Gotcha relates adoption to aggressive consumerism; and consumerism to a public act of virtue. Daniel ibn Zayd writes that , Gotcha moves the private into public space: Continue Reading →

Adoptees: The new sleeping giant

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AdoptionLand is a strange place. By statute, Koreans become Americans and Swiss, Americans Guatemalans become Irish, Cambodians become Brits, Brits become Swedes, Ethiopians become Norwegians, Congolese become Belgian, Oklahoma Indians become South Carolina Italilans, Jews become Catholics, Catholics become Nazarenes, Buddhists become Presbyterians at the flick of the Bic in the judge’s hand Let’ snot even start on race. We’re the original post moderns. Fluid, rootless, and without a context of our own, though we fit into other people’s contexts as neat as a Victorian parlor.. The product of 100 years of Progressive social engineering. And we still don’t get no respect.

And the really bizarre part of this is that nobody but us finds this identity shift on demand strange but us.

What I find exciting though, is that we are a worldwide movement of the :displaced, deidentified, disenfranchised, dismembered, undocumented, and colonized. We are everywhere. We must be dangerous. Continue Reading →

Our Bastard Moments: Real everyday adoption awareness, not just for November

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We’re having a discussion today on the Bastard Nation Facebook page on The Bastard Moment. Those times when as an adoptee you are insulted, embarrassed, patronized, degraded, demeaned, dishonored, silenced due strictly to your adoptive status. It’s part of the legislative process, but it’s also part of the personal process in the construction of Class Bastard.

Bastard Moments often occur out of no where when bumblers make rude, gratuitous. yet genuinely clueless and innocent remarks about your adoption, usually built around the theme of gratitude. My favorite is, “aren’t you glad you weren’t brought up in a trailer park?” Actually, I know adoptees in rural southern Ohio who were! I call them Bastards on Blocks) Continue Reading →

Gladney: Coincidence or Disaster Adoptionism?

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Let’ see, five days ago Typhoon Hayian, one of the biggest storms on record, hit the Philippines .The Philippine government estimated initially that 10,000 people died Today, President Benigno Aquino, downgraded the number to around 2500, but aid workers are skeptical. I heard on the news a little while ago that about a half million people are homeless. The area has little food, water, and shelter. There is cirtually no police or security. Looting is rampant.

Now the tweet shows up with a link to Gladney’s Philippines program. Continue Reading →

CAICW Rejects Civil Discourse: Bans comments from adoptee rights activists

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So, now I’ve been banned from posting on the CAICW FB page. It’s ironic that the co-founder and Executive Chair of the largest adoptee civil rights organization in North America isn’t allowed to post on a FB page promoted in part as an adoptee rights page. I must have been banned after the polite comments I made a couple weeks ago

I guess “adoptee rights” for these people means the right of babies to be adopted by worthy (straight, married) suburban white folks with prayer partners PR hacks, and $480/hr baby carriage chasers. Two cars in every garage. A chicken in every pot. Continue Reading →

ICWA-Induced PTSD: Give me “my child” lest I wake up screaming

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OK. NAAM and the baybee traders have finally pushed me over the edge. I’ll keep this short and sweet:

Sunday night the Christian Alliance for Indian Children published a prayer request on its Facebook page for “mothers and families” suffering from ICWA-induced PSTD. Continue Reading →

NAAM: Adoption is God’s will

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Propaganda like NAAM’s looks awfully close to cultural appropriation. Or inviting your maid and her kids to sit at your Thanksgiving table. Remember when Adam Pertman opined that international adoption could world peace?

Is praying that a family will be broken up so you can have one really God’s agenda? According to NAAM propaganda, it is, Or is it?. As Rosie O’Donnell so notoriously said, “God put you in the wrong tummy and I have to fix it.” Continue Reading →

Media Distortions in the Veronica Brown Case: Adoptionis only about adopters

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Corcoran takes to task Washington Times reporter Andrea Poe (and others) for focusing on the “heartache of the adoptive family” while neglecting the other side. Poe wrote in TWT that the case is “every parent’s worst nightmare.” and later in HuffPo that [t]his is not an illegal abduction, although it certainly sounds that way” and that the “adoption community has been devastated by this news.” (links to these quotes and many others in the original article.). Continue Reading →