Important New Update on Oregon HB 2843: Clarification from Helen Hill.

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Helen Hill has clarified what went down in Salem yesterday about HB 2843. (see blog directly below this). I’m quoting her entire post here so there are no questions: TO BE CLEAR! I did not meet with Rep. Hunt… I had a very brief meeting with the outer office people, who told me Hunt (who is Speaker of the House, by the way) was floating this bill at the request of a constituent. Two of the office people said “you don’t have to worry about this. it’s not going anywhere” or something to that effect. I left some written info. I have a meeting at 1:45 this coming Tuesday with the legislative aid that is running with this. Ron Morgan is going to be there too, (YAY RON!) and any of you who are in the area and would like to come and discuss why this bill should be dropped, please do stop by Rep Hunt’s office next Tuesday. This is not the time for conspiracy theory. There is internet chatter that HB 2843 was induced by any number of factions: adoption agencies, intermediaries, searchers, churches, and money interests. Helen has been very clear that the bill, as far as Continue Reading →

Oregon HB 2843: Hold Your Horses! Send Affirmative Letters

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Earlier today we learned that Rep. Dave Hunt (D-Gladstone) recently introduced HB 2843 in the Oregon House. The bill essentially repeals the adoptee rights landmark Measure 58 ballot initiative, which in 1998 restored the right of OBC access there. This bill came out of nowhere. Helen Hill, chief petitioner for Measure 58, met with with Rep. Hunt and his aides this morning. Helen reports that their talk was very fruitful and highly positive. Helen will be meeting with Rep. Hunt again on Tuesday and feels that any escalation at this time would not be useful. If more action is needed after that meeting, she will let us know. In the meantime, Helen requests that no “angry letters” be sent to Rep. Hunt, but…if you are an Oregon adoptee please write a note to him affirming the positive results of M58. [email protected] You can also make make comments on the bill here: Read the Oregon Adoptee Rights Blog and join the list: Mary Hunt Peret’s blog on the history original birth certificates is here. The history of the M58 campaign is here. Well keep you updated!

Cognitive Dissonance: Bastards, Birthers, and Bad Bills

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Adopted adults, especially since 9/11, have increasingly been denied passports, drivers licenses, pensions, Social Security benefits, professional certifications, and security clearances due to discrepancies on their fictive amended birth certificates produced by the state, and their inability to produce a true original birth certificate to respond to those discrepancies. Now, due to our lack of an OBC, we may not be allowed to run for president or vice president (or other offices) if some states have their way. Currently, 11 state legislatures are looking at bills to force presidential/vp candidates to divvy up their birth certificates to prove citizenship and that they are who they say they are. If these measures pass, the birth certificate requirement will no doubt seep down to all elective offices from city council and county commission to state and federal legislatures and courts. Although voters are already required to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote, I don’t think it’s beyond reason that more stringent requirements will be mandated; thus potentially disenfranchising millions of the country’s adopted adults due to lack of their “real” birth certificates. The highly unpopular Real ID,which about two dozen states have refused to implement. and other Draconian “security Continue Reading →

Connecticut: Bastard Nation Letter in Opposition to HB 890

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Connecticut currently has two OBC access bills in the hopper. The first, HB 65 is a placeholder which has yet to be written. The second is HB 890 which would open OBCs prospectively for adoptees 21 years old and older adopted after January 2, 2012 contains a disclosure veto. HB 890 is scheduled for a hearing tomorrow before the legislature’s Select Committee on Children. We sent this letter opposing the bill to committee members this afternoon: Bastard Nation: the Adoptee Rights Organization, is the largest adoptee civil rights organization in the United States. We support full, unrestricted access for all adopted persons, upon request, of their own true, unaltered original birth certificates (OBC). We oppose HB 890, a bill that would prospectively the OBC to adoptees, with disclosure veto restrictions, to persons 21 years of age or older, whose adoptions were finalized on or after October 12, 2012. This bill is scheduled to be heard tomorrow, February 8, 2011 by the Select Committee on Children. Bastard Nation. opposes HB 890, and urges you to vote Do Not Pass. HB 890 creates a nonsensical tiered discriminatory system of OBC access for Connecticut adoptees based on their date of birth, date of Continue Reading →

HuffPo Continues to Censor Bastardette: TRAs aren’t all happy dappy!

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I’m working on some Russian updates. What were once simple and straightforward reviews of cases have turned into tales of Tolstoyan proportion. Meanwhile, yesterday I was censored again by Huffington Post. This time over daring to suggest that international adoption isn’t white bread. My comments came under Adam Pertman’s new blog entry, Lessons in Adoption from BJ Lifton, Harvard, and Oprah. I’ll post some comments on that in a separate blog and try to get it on HuffPo as well, but I may be expelled to the Bad Bastard’s corner unless I limit myself to commentary on Kim Kardasian, Melissa Etheridge, and the decline of the American Left. Part of my comment to HuffPo was cross-posted to Facebook, but due to size restrictions FB won’t carry the whole thing. Left off were comments from the Transracial Abductee site that I included. Here’s how it played out. Poster Jack Grissom wrote in part: One of the issues people bring up is adopted children being raised by parents that are of a different biological ethnic background than their own. All I can say is, I don’t think that I’ve ever heard an adult who was adopted as a child wish that they Continue Reading →

Actions Speak Louder than Words: The Evan B. Donaldson Strikes Out on HuffPo

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Wednesday (January 12) the Huffington Post published a blog, A Civil Right: Adoptees Have a Right to Access Their Own Birth Certificates by Adam Pertman, director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute. In it, Mr. Pertman calls for the restoration of the right of adoptees to their own original birth certificates. Or does he? Only after 3 1/2 paragraphs, in which Mr. Pertman discusses slavery, suffrage and DADT, does he get around to adoptees (not bastards) and our obcs. To the casual reader, with little or no background on deformist history, the piece may make a good read. Unfortunately it isn’t. Mr. Pertman simply continues the Donaldson’s spurious claim to support obc access for all, while it happily works for passage of bills that restrict access for some, leaving classes of bastards behind to float in a black hole. For instance, last year Mr. Pertman delivered eloquent testimony before a New Jersey House committee hearing declaring the right of all adoptees, without restriction, to their original birth certificates Unfortunately, he was testifying in support of A1406, a deform bill that contains disclosure and contact vetoes (even worse, used interchangeably; that is, a poor bastard with a contact veto slapped Continue Reading →

My Unicorn by Guest Blogger Justin Mitchell Bennett

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Another year draws to a close, and thankfully, another Christmas has passed. I have never been one to celebrate Christmas, and perhaps the most memorable, and darkest had been the one experienced, December 24th, 2006. I’d sat atop Twin Peaks, in San Francisco, California, the cold wind that night chilling me to the bone. As I’d ridden a motorcycle there, I couldn’t just hop into a car and turn on the heater. For many, Christmas may be a time to be among family, yet that evening. I’d never felt so isolated, and alone – as though the chill of death surrounded me. I had returned from an Iraq deployment earlier in the year, and though I would depart San Francisco shortly into 2007, during my time in San Francisco, I’d made progress, on a lifelong quest, which to an adoptee, may be referred to as “The Search.” Perhaps part of what made that Christmas so dark for me, I had reunited, via telephone, with one half of my biological family, an Uncle. Sadly, I’d been informed of my birth father passing away. Mourning the death of someone you’d never known, and whose passing had occurred years prior, coupled with understanding Continue Reading →

Check out Once was Von: Interview with Joanne Wolf Small

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Blogger Von has a nice interview with long-time bastard rights activist Joanne Wolf Little, Adoption Mystique, titled after Joanne’s hard hitting book of the same name. I was “introduced” to Joanne in 1980, via an article she’d written in a psych publication a few years earlier. She was the first person I ever “knew” who politicized the adoption experience and articulated how we’d been screwed and bastaradized by the state After I read Adoption Mystique, I thought, she’s said it all! What can we add to it? Damn! I really liked Joanne’s answer to Von’s question: Do you believe the stigma of adoption and of illegitimacy have changed” but I’ll let you go over there and read her reply yourself. Joanne is a long time member of Bastard Nation and a member of Bastard Nation’s Legislative Committee. In 2007 I wrote about Joanne here (scroll down).

Bastard Nation Action Alert: Write NJ Legislators Today; Vote NO on A1406/S799!

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Distribute Freely BASTARD NATION ACTION ALERT! STOP DISCLOSURE VETO/WHITE OUT LEGISLATION IN NEW JERSEY!!! ASK THE NEW JERSEY ASSEMBLY: VOTE NO ON A1406/S799 Read full text of A1406 here.Read full text of S799 here A1406 (companion to S799 already passed in the NJ Senate) is scheduled for a floor vote sometime in the next few weeks. Proponents of this bad bill hoped to have it on the schedule for a January 6, 2011 vote, but it’s not on the list. Please contact Assembly members immediately and urge them to VOTE NO ON A1406/S799. (Contact information below.) If you are from or in New Jersey or have a New Jersey connection, mention it in your communication. Be sure to put: “Vote No On Adoptee Birthright Bill “in the header Bastard Nation’s letter to the Assembly is here. A1406/S799 is: restrictive, discriminatory, creates a new, special and temporary ”right” for “birthparents,” and exempts the state’s adopted adults from equal protection and treatment regarding the release of the government-generated public record of their births. THE BILL *includes a 12- month open enrollment period, starting after the Department of Health releases regs for A1406/S799 implementation, that allows “birthparents,” to file disclosure vetoes (DV) before Continue Reading →

Bastard Nation Letter to NJ Legislature: Vote No on A1406/S799

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Dear __________: Privilege is the opposite of right Bastard Nation: the Adoptee Rights Organization is the largest adoptee civil rights organization in the United States. We support full, unrestricted access for all adopted persons, upon request, of their own true, unaltered original birth certificates (OBC). We oppose A1406/S799: the Adoptees’ Birthright Bill. A1406/S799 permits some New Jersey adopted adults to receive their true and accurate original birth certificates. Others, through the compromise language of the birthparent disclosure veto, will receive only a false and mutilated government document with the name and address of the parent(s) bureaucratically excised by the Department of Health and Senior Services by order of the birthparent(s). Bastard Nation rejects this special veto right of “birthparents” to remove their names from the birth certificates of their own adult offspring. No other parent has that right. Why should “birthparents,” whose parental rights were terminated decades ago, have different rights and rules? A1406/S799 is promoted as an “adoptees’ birthright” and OBC “access bill.” Unfortunately, it is neither. The bill reinforces out-dated adoption secrecy through the disclosure veto. It also seals by default, the OBCs of babies surrendered under the state’s “safe haven” program (apparently whether they are adopted later Continue Reading →