Bastardette has had a love affair with William Burroughs since she was 14. His A Thanksgiving Prayer is posted below. It’s nervy, but I’ve dared to add to the Master’s Voice. I believe it fits nicely after “Thanks for a nation of finks.” Continue Reading →
OK. We have reached Day 24 of National Adoption Month, and I’m tired. I don’t feel very clever, and for the first time in my life, I’m wondering what I would be doing if I hadn’t been adopted and hadn’t been aggrieved by the whole adoption process. Continue Reading →
That said, we know that our personal adoption stories are up for grabs. First parents, adoptive parents, reporters, adoption agents, social workers, re-homers, facilitators, religious nuts, neo-libs, do-gooders, and outsiders of multiple stripes hijack our stories for their sometimes contradictory and oppositional, own agendas. I call this Narrative Expropriation. Somebody speaks for us. Somebody pretends to be us. Somebody pretends we share the same histories, opinions, and desires. Somebody uses us to create their own stories. Continue Reading →
The Foster Youth Bill of Rights not only ensures that youth have a safe place to live, but also that they have a voice regarding their care and an opportunity for a normal childhood. Continue Reading →
Well, yesterday was National Adoption Day, that very special holiday where hundreds of children ritually and legally across the country, lose their names, histories, and biological families, and turn into someone else. Why is such a loss, such a tragedy celebrated? Why is the privacy of these children invaded and manipulated? Continue Reading →
Bomberger & Co has a problem with anything that reeks of racial and gender equality, economic equity, bodily autonomy, and movements to establish or restore rights, that even he himself, a bi-racial adoptee, fails to qualify for under the gaze of white supremacy. Apparently, it’s enough that We-the-Fetus has been saved, and the only right we deserve after that, is the right to be adopted. I’m not sure how someone who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about adoptee rights, can ethically promote adoption. I could have missed something, but I’ve never heard a peep about erased identities, sealed records, adoption trauma, or any other garbage that is lobbed at adopted people. Continue Reading →
I am trying to write a summary of some of my NAM work here but slogging through dense legal jibber- jabberesque that, at the moment, is impossible to climb through. Of course, laws are written in this obscure language to keep normal people from grasping what the federal, state, and local lawmaking hooligans are up to Continue Reading →
This procedure bothers me for a lot of reasons, but here’s the question. Do these adoption agencies charge their clients the usual $20,000-$50,000 or do they have a contract or agreement with the state to utilize the cut-rate DCS fee? I have this eccentric idea that most parents who use the SH system didn’t intend for their babies to be sold on the open market by adoption agents. I have this eccentric idea that nobody wants to talk about the $$$ issue. Continue Reading →
Ariel died (excuse me! allegedly died) at the hands of her forever family, but ultimately she died at the hands of the State of Hawaii. The Sellers were “simply” the instruments of destruction. I haven’t seen such a contemptible use of state power regarding adoption and its blowback or years–though I am sure many and most blow right into the clouds–or the next news cycle, We only hear about the big cases when they are too big to hide. Of course, as adopted people, we know all about “confidentiality” and “privacy” and secrets, and ass-covering. Sealed records, hidden identities, government cover-up. lack of state and agency accountability, paternalism, social and cultural colonialism, and imperialism–that what turns the adoption machine. As adopted people, that’s what grinds away our psyche and our lives– since we were signed away–or weren’t. Oh, the mysteries behind those closed doors.closed meetings that not even murder can force open. Continue Reading →
I have an overactive need to be dutiful and responsible to the movement (but not myself particularly, as my unchosen lifestyle proves). After Oregon, I thought we would win it all. Sometimes I’m not sure if we will win. Sometimes I’m convinced we won’t at all. There is so much about this fight, not about us or adopiton, that’s foisted on us by outsiders and outliers, to fit their own social and political agendas. It’s hard enough fighting the adoptacrats and their fellow traveler droids in the system without fighting the abortacrats, christacrats, entitlecrats, and Republicrats who know nothing about adoption, and Class Bastard, and don’t want to know, cuz, let’s face it–our fight is all about them and their weird, special interests. We just get in the way. Continue Reading →