Stop CHIFF: A short introductory essay on the plan to drop-box the world's children into American exburbia

Over the next few weeks Bastard Nation and the Daily Bastardette will be publishing information, research, and commentary written by ourselves and others on CHIFF: The Children in Families First, a bill introduced last Congressional year by senatorial adoptacessive Mary Landrieu (D-LA). The bill is backed by the adoption industry, the evangelical orphan movement, and other “stakeholders” pushing to increase US adoption agency presence around the world, especially in Third World countries. IOW, getting the state to fund and pimp private industry to other countries’ poor. CHIFF promotes kinship dissolution, closing group homes and orphanages (such as operated by UNICEF and Childrens Village), and false humanitarianism to make international adoption “easier” for America’s desperate and childless. CHIFF shills reject all attempts of input by adoptees, first parents, and others actually impacted by CHIFF. The so-called angry, maladjusted and ungrateful. One pusher refers to anti-CHIFFERS as “socialists” though I can’t think of anything more socialist than white elites legislatively melding business and state in an “humanitarian” attempt to disgorge foreign cultures and dispossess and redistribute the children of the world drop- boxing them into American exburbia.

Here is CHIFF as seen through the eyes of chiff-chief propagandist, Katie Jay.

If you haven’t already, joined the Stop CHIFF page on Facebook do it now!

Opposition from legislators and the public is growing quickly and we believe this bill can be defeated.

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This past weekend, Bastard Nation co-founder and long-time adoptee right activist Shea Grimm published a piece on CHIFF in the DailyKo.: Children and Families First (CHIFF) and the Evangelical Adoption Movement. (Please go there to “recommend.”). With Shea’s permission it is re-posted on the Bastard Nation webpage. This is a very important essay and a primer for StopCHIFF activists. .

There are so many reasons to StopCHIFF starting from its promoter hacks:

However, thousands of adult adoptees in the United States, including international adoptees, are actively involved in adoption policy, yet not a single significant group of them support CHIFF or were invited to give input during the drafting of this legislation. Shouldn’t a bill that purports to be about and for international adoptees at least consider their voices?

Additionally, there are international adoptee professionals who could have provided much needed insight during the drafting of this legislation and policy discussions, but none appear on the list of CHIFF supporters nor on the CHIFF Executive Committee. Indeed, CHIFF’s EC reads like a “who’s who” list of those who have for decades opposed transparency in adoption and ethical, responsible provisions regarding termination of birthparent rights; including the National Council for Adoption, Saddleback Church, Both Ends Burning, and the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys.

to its Calvinistic neo-colonial agenda cloaked in counterfeit humanitarianism:

It is believed that one of the authors of this bill, and certainly a staunch supporter, is Whitney Reitz, legislative aide to Senator Mary Landrieu, who at the time of the Haiti earthquake debacle was quoted as saying that if they ignored the Hague convention in pushing through American adoptions of Haitian children, many of whom had desperate families looking for them during the displacement caused by the earthquake, well, she ‘wasn’t going to apologize for that’.

Mother Jones wrote a comprehensive expose of evangelical “Orphan Fever” where many of the same names in the evangelical network can be found among the endorses of CHIFF.

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It’s pretty difficult to muck up adoption as much as CHIFF does. Even worse, to think you can get away with it. CHIFF is a cipher upon which is written everything that is wrong with US adoption today.