RECORDS ACCESS = ANTI=ADOPTION = ABORTION: THE SILLINESS GOES ON

In my previous entry I discussed the recent blog by Heidi Hess Saxton in which she links abortion and adoption, and asserts that adoptee rights advocates, activists, and their fellow travelers are”anti-adoption.” This is nothing new, of course. The silliness that adoptees who want the government’s fingers off their records and adoptacrats out of our lives are selfish, anti-adoption hedonists echos through every statehouse. Records access = anti-adoption = abortion is written-in-stone- blahblahblah by our anti-abortion opposition Even the ACLU tosses it around when all else fails. It is a tactic designed specifically to discredit and marginalize us as disturbed and “out-of-touch” –or “worse” (by their definition).

But now it’s ramped up. “trailblazer” commenting on Saxton’s blog takes this laughable argument a step further. A lot further. (cut and past with all typos in tact):

trailblazer says:
November 11th, 2008 at 9:57 pm

It seems clear enough to me that all rhetoric aside the purpose of ant-adoption initiatives under whatever guise (knowingly or unknowingly) is to further the abortion industry by removing one the main legitimate options to abortion.

The enemy consistently uses half truths and seemingly logical arguments to gain a little ground at a time as part of a plan for a greater victory.

Michael

So we are not only disgruntled, angry and mean, we are stupid dupes. A gang of “abortion industry” topsy-turvey stealth operators of Ralph Reed’s you-don’t-know-it’s-over-until-you’re-in-a-body-bag strategy of the 1990s. Adoptees, to people like “trailblazer,” are forever children, manipulated and brainwashed into “illegitimate” grievances. I’m surprised the Communist Menace and Osama weren’t brought up.

This crackpottery of adoptees-as-secret-agents-of-abortion hasn’t been popular since the early days of Bastard Nation and Doe v Sundquist. That it’s come back even if it’s just one person, shows how desperate, paranoid and purposefully ignorant our opposition is, It shows us what it really thinks about us arrows of God that selfless women shoot out to ease the pain of the desperate and childless.

Here’s Pat Robertson and Jay Sekulow, director of the Christian domionist American Center for Law and Justice on the July 2, 1996 edition of The 700 Club discussing Sundquist, which ACLJ flogged unsuccessfully for NCFA and its cronies. Sekulow warned Robertson’s audience that abortion rates would rise in relation to the rate of obc access. He called adoptee rights activists agents of abortion. For reasons unknown he conflated open records with open adoption. Whether on purpose or not, Sekulow showed just how his crew of nutters view openness in adoption.

This transcript is no longer online, but I have a hard copy in my possession.

SEKULOW:…The significance of this we expect that those that are in favor of abortion, those in the legislature that are pro-abortion, those that are trying to get this whole abortion agenda through were looking at the Tennessee case and say “Gee, we should do this everywhere because they picked a great name, open adoption…but

ROBERTSON: Do you really think that they had in view more abortions and less adoption? Do you really feel that?

SEKULOW: Pat they have had to. Can I give you tangible evidence? No? But I can give you lega evidence. We looked at cases in the United Sates where judges from a Court of Appeals all over the country said, “this type of legislation opening up these records like this is pro-abortion.” Those were the words a court said. There’s a North Carolina Court of Appeals, Louisiana Court of Appeals, Texas Court of Appeals. These same types of bill were being put forward and the courts said, “This legislation is not pro-life.” They said the opposite. They said, ” This is pro-abortion. This will encourage abortions and discourage adoptions. So they had to know that.”

Yet nine moths later on MSNBC’s The Site, ACLU’s chief lawyer Larry Crain in the case conceded that the ACLJ did not intend to use evidence it had gathered from a New South Wales study that showed that although abortion rates went up the first year of records access, they declined steadily after. “We’re not relying on statistical evidence for our case,” he said. “and we are not required to.” ( This, too, is no longer online, but a hard copy is in my possession).

Nobody has answered the obvious question: why should adopted people be denied their civil rights because of the speculative, perfectly legal action, of someone else?

Photo of Sekulow by Bastardette