Tag Archives: Publication

Fight Back Against Surveillance Day: Implications for Adoptee Rights

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This over-arching state snooping is not lost on bastard activists. The very forces that confiscate and seal our own birth records, and replace them with forged “amended” replacements–then go to extremes to keep adoption secret, insisting that birthparents must remain anonymous and unknown from their own family members–monitor our cellphones, emails, and other digital communications rooting out dangerous words and ideas that could be critical of the state. Continue Reading →

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 →

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 →

Hard Rock Manifesto: Whose side are you on?

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We have proven that focused, energized civil rights campaigns can win. Yet, today we are sitting in the midst of corporate America–the Hard Rock Cafe– amongst a sea of adoption tweakers, self-defeaters, self- promoters, and neocons, who have never passed a “clean bill,” having a bizarre discussion over what we can learn about adoption (or open records?) from Oprah Winfrey–or so it was billed. This is the most bizarre adopta meeting since Ron Morgan, Bill Pierce, and Troy Dunn hooked up in LA to go on the Dr. Laura Show. We know how to restore adoptee access to our OBCs.. The only question now should be: why isn’t everybody following the model? Continue Reading →

Why is Adoptee Rights Still an Issue? the 20/20 question

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National Adoption Month 2013 opened with a bang today.  Clicked on a link to “Bethany Christian Services” and “NAM” and got a live sex site. (No, I won’t put up the link) Then there’s the real porn.  ABC/s 20/20 Facebook question: Do you think all adoptive children should have access to their biological parents? Excuse me?   Some production intern, without much thought or grammatical skills, must have posted the question. I’m not even sure what the question even means: Does it refer to actual children, open adoption, the right of adult adoptees to their own original birth certificates? Or what? For the last 80 years, for their own specific  and sometimes unrelated reasons,  the state and its  politicians, along with social engineers, private industry, therapists, churches, and social do-gooders across the political spectrum have moderated the public and private lives of adoptees and their families.  Nowhere is the entwining of the personal and the political so grotesquely practiced as in adoption in the United States today.  Nowhere is the conflation of adults with children in public policy and public imagination so blatant.. Hence, even those deeply involved in bastard rights, don’t know for sure what the clumsy 20/20– post even Continue Reading →

SPRINGFIELD SHENNIGHANS: Illinois Adoptees Hustled and Shuffled

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Tuesday, I wrote that Amendment 1 to HB 4623, would be heard by the Illinois House Adoption Reform Committee the next day. This amendment would add limited records access language to the CI fix-it bill which had already passed Rules. I was told by sponsor Rep. Sara Feigenholtz’s office that this hearing was for language approval only. If approved, the amended bill would be published on the Illinois legislative site probably on Friday. I posted that information in good faith, wondering how it would really play out. Now we know. Late yesterday afternoon I was forwarded the email below sent by Melisha Mitchell, the putative author of the bill, with the news that HB 4623 had passed out of the Adoption Reform Committee, 8-1. The only opposition came from Illinois Right to Life. Dear All: I am happy to report that HB 4623, Illinois’ obc access bill, waspassed out of the House Adoption Reform Committee today, 8 votes to1. We had letters of support from most of the state’s prominentadoption agencies and adoptive parents’ groups as well as the supportof the Dept. of Public Health, Dept. of Children and Family Services,NASW, and IL Psychiatrists Assn.; in addition, the Chicago Bar Continue Reading →

BE CAREFUL OF WHAT YOU ASK FOR! NEW JERSEY CATHOLIC CONFERENCE WANTS TO HEAR FIRST MOTHER STORIES!

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For the record, Bastardette and Bastard Nation oppose the tortuously compromised S 611, passed by the New Jersey Senate on Monday 30-7. The bill allows some adoptees to get their original birth certificates while others, slapped with a disclosure veto, get the sanitized white-out version. There are other restrictions, too. I haven’t written about the Jersey situation lately, but my blog Settling for Less Than You Deserve on the 2006 look-alike bill will fill you in. (For more NJ entries just type in to Bastardette’s Blogger search engine). That said, it’s been entertaining in a sick sort of way to watch New Jersey’s adoptee haters, legalized child traffickers, religious conversionists, and identity thieves bloviate over ungrateful adoptees and their rights. To hear the Catholic Church’s affiliate hornswogglers — The Catholic Conference, New Jersey Right to Life,and the Knights of Columbus–talk, even limited government respect for adoptees and their rights will cause the state to break off and fall into the Atlantic. Patrick J. Brannigan, Executive Director of the New Jersey Catholic Conference, for instance, holds the quaint belief that first parents just “move on” after surrender since the state seals their pasts as tight as a tomb, leaving them to Continue Reading →

THE PROBLEM WITH CINDRU: "ANY INTERESTED PARTY CAN SUE TO HAVE THEM (RECORDS) OPENED"

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Tonight ABC News will feature a segment on records access. As a run-up to the show a discussion about adoptee rights is being held on the ABC internet forum. The direct link isn’t punching in, so cut and paste this http://abcnews.go.com/WN/comments?type=story&id=4332269 Everyone so far supports adoptees except one poster: As an adoptive parent who chose to adopt internationally under the UN’s Hague Treaty, I can tell you it is better to do so internationally than to adopt domestically. There is no uniformity to adoption laws in the US and they definetly are NOT written with the interests of the adopting parents in mind. These people are the most important part of a successful adoption yet they have very little legal standing during the adoption process. We wanted a truly closed adoption. In the United States, there is no such thing. No matter how much records are supposedly sealed. Any interested party can sue to have them opened. We wanted none of that.Posted by:Cindru2000 Feb-23 I’m sure that Bastardette’s readers–or adoptee rights activists and adoptees in search–will be comforted to know that “any interested party” can sue to have records opened. Technically, of course, anybody can sue, but I guess all Continue Reading →

FLORIDA: DAVID BUNDY–GET A LIFE!

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Here’s the letter I wrote to the Orlando Sentinel regarding David Bundy’s claim that the Florida Children’s Home Society promises anonymity to women who place their children for adoption. Please go over to the site (link above) and add your own comments–or write a letter. To the Editor: David Bundy, CEO of the Florida Children’s Home Society claims that parents who place their children are guaranteed anonymity (Nov. 18). Under what authority does Mr. Bundy make this promise? In the 30 year War Against Adoptees, the adoption industry has been force feeding this mythical promise to lawmakers and the public in an effort hide their own misdeeds. They have been unable, however, to present one single document or other evidence that shows these “guarantees.” Original birth records are sealed when an adoption is ordered, not when parental rights are terminated. If the child is not adopted, the birth records remain unsealed. During the relinquishment and adoption process, names and other identifying information about biological parents are often posted in legal ads in newspapers and appear on court documents given to adoptive parents. The not-adopted need not justify why they want their vital records. They have a presumed right to their Continue Reading →

ANONYMITY: THE NEW CONFIDENTIAL–ADOPTION SHILLS SPEAK OUT

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Sunday, two adoption shills, NCFA crony Aaron Britvan and Florida Children’s Home Society David Bundy, crawled out of their cabbage patch to complain about the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute’s “For the Records” report issued last week which recommended the opening of adoption records to all adult adoptees. I obviously have problems with the report, but I’ve also got a problem with adoptacrats who write to newspapers, grinding their fangs because the beneficiaries of their hard work don’t sufficiently appreciate their efforts to disengage us from our identities and rights. And first mothers….it’s a wonder, at least according to these bullies, that the poor “vulnerable” dears answer their phones for fear of what BBB’s (Bastards Behaving Badly) might do. After all, our moms (why don’t these hacks ever mention dads?) were “promised anonymity.” Did they sign the papers in invisible ink? Anonymity? Bastardette must be dense. I thought it was all about “confidentiality” and “privacy” But then, since the advent of legalized baby dumping (what the adoption class nicely calls “Safe Haven laws”) we’ve seen a conflation of these two Axis of Evil favorites with their new favorite “promise”: anonymity. Or maybe these guys think they’re all the same thing.If Continue Reading →