Sunday, August 31, 2008

NOT LETTING OBAMA OFF THE HOOK

NOTE: This is cross-posted from my main blog, The Daily Bastardette.

Though, I've been writing about John McCain's adoption problem, (see previous entry) I did not intend to leave Barack Obama off the hook.

Obama, too, warmed to Rick Warren's suggestion of a PEPFAR plan to "rescue" by adoption 148 million so-called orphans 'round the world. His comments below, in conjunction with his earlier stated belief in Jesus as his redeemer,is code for his willingness to open up adoption (more than it already is!) to a globalist evangelical-government partnership.

From the CNN transcript:

WARREN: OK. This one is dear to my heart. Most people don't know that there are 148 million orphans in the world. 148 million kids growing up without mommies and dads. They don't need to be in an orphanage. They need to be in families. But a lot of families can't afford to take these kids in. Would you be willing to consider and even commit to doing some kind of emergency plan for orphans, like President Bush did with AIDS, almost a president's emergency plan for orphans, to deal with this issue?

OBAMA: I cheated a little bit. I actually looked at this idea ahead of time, and I think it is a great idea. I think it's something that we should sit down and figure out, working between non-governmental organizations, you know, national institutions, the U.S. government and try to figure out what can we do. I think that part of our plan, though, has to be, how do we prevent more orphans in the first place, and that means that we're helping to build a public health infrastructure around the world, that we are, you know, building on the great work that you, and by the way, this president has done when it comes to AIDS funding around the world. I think it helps. I'm often a critic of President Bush, but I think the PETFAR [sic] program has saved lives and has done very good work and he deserves enormous credit for that.

Obama has no personal adoption baggage or scandal--that we know of--but like McCain, he has no problem pandering to the christo-socialist adoption agenda and its money-grubbing child redistribution agencies. The US government has no business funding mis-named "faith based" programs of any type, and certainly not those that seek movement and church growth through adopta-evangelization.

Adoption "reformers" need to put both these jokers on notice.

JOHN MCCAIN; "WE HAVE TO MAKE ADOPTION EASIER"



NOTE 1: This is cross-posted from my main blog The Daily Bastardette, where I have been discussing Biblical American connections to adoption.

NOTE: This entry was originally much longer. Due to commitments this Labor Day Weekend, I am unable to finish up, so I am publishing only Part 1. Part 2 will go up next week.


The other day I posted Another Reason to Hate John McCain: He Lies About Adoption. I'd now like to point you to Pound Pup's Legacy's The Black Sheep (please read it all!) for a further view of The John & Cindy Show. Niels lays out a disturbing idea that should send up red flags for anyone with even a passing interest in adoption ethics:

It is a weird story and though it never raised much suspicion, it doesn't make much sense to me, unless it is to cover up the fact John McCain used his political influence to circumvent normal procedures. What couple wouldn't discuss such an important decision without at least consulting one another? Was there no contact between the two, while Cindy McCain was in Bangladesh?

******

During his Saddleback Forum interview with Rick Warren, McCain made the Piercian claim, that USians rush to adopt internationally because adoption in the US is too difficult.

Though non-committal, McCain seemed open to Warren's suggestion that the federal government create an "emergency program" similar to PEPFAR (The President's Plan for AIDS Relief), the 10-year $48 billion abstinence until marriage, condom-free (except for high risk cases), abortion gag, AIDS prevention and treatment program pimped by the Bush administration to poor countries. Recent re-authorization of the program seems to have lightened a few of the more onerous mandates much to the dismay of moral scolds (and here). Liberal critics say that the program has done more to promote the sexual rectitude and ideology of the Catholic Church and Protestant fundamentalists than to prevent the HIV transmission. (See here and here and here for some of their criticism.)

Imagine, now, what mischief "faith-based" adoption wackadoodles--in control of much of the US adoption trade already-- with the imprimatur of the president, could do here and in the Third World, with PEPFAR-type money under the guise of "saving children.

Here is the CNN transcript of the adoption discussion in the McCain-Warren interview (emphasis mine):

WARREN: John, most people don’t know that there are 148 million orphans in the world growing up without parents.

What should we do about this, and would you be willing to consider or even commit to something similar to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS — which he said AIDS is an emergency — a PEPFAR. Could we do a PEPFAR for the emergency plan for 148 million orphans?

Most of these - they don’t need to grow up in orphanages. They need to be in families, and many of those families could take them in if they had some kind of assistance.

MCCAIN: Well, I think we have to make adoption a lot easier in this country. That’s why so many people go to other countries to get - to be able to adopt children.

(APPLAUSE) My great hero and role model Teddy Roosevelt was the first modern American president to talk about adoption and how important it was, and I promise you this is my last story.

Seventeen years ago Cindy was in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She went to Mother Teresa’s orphanage. The nuns brought her two little babies who were not going to live. Cindy came home. I met her at the airplane. She showed me this 5-week-old baby and said, “Meet your new daughter.” She’s 17, and our life is blessed - and that’s what adoption is all about.

(APPLAUSE)

******

It it is extremely important for us to listen to what McCain says about adoption, The McCains alleged skirting of adoption ethics and law, if true, (including Cindy McCain's documented and confessed dope binge in the middle of the procurement-adoption process) and alleged string-pulling in another adoption, indicate the type of entitlement and affect the McCains will have on US adoption policy and reform--especially the movement of domestic and international product--if the presumptive GOP nominee is elected.

We cannot dismiss this as election year blather. If McCain gathers in evangelicals and is elected and Cindy McCain is serious about being the First Lady of Adoption as she said she was in 2000, we could end up with an Adoption Czar in the White House...and adoptees in the dog house.

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"PILL GOGGLES': THE AMERICAN LIFE LEAGUE'S LATEST WACKY ATTEMPT TO KEEP WOMEN CONTRACEPTIVE-FREE

NOTE: This is cross-posted from my main blog, The Daily Bastardette

If James Dobson and National Council for Adoption confused you the other day, then the latest American Life League Report's, "Pill Goggles," will send you straight into full-blown dementia.

According to ALL "reporter" Michael Hitchborn, oral contraceptives can "disrupt a woman's natural abilities to select the perfect mate." At first I thought this meant that use of "The Pill" (whackjobs love archaic terms) just encourages women to hook up with any appetizing stray male she encounters in a public bathroom without much chance of a Baby Bumble popping out 9 months later. Of course, that's not what Mr. Hitchborn is scolding us about--at least not in this segment.

It's deeper than that. It's genes.






If that doesn't work, click here for the fun.

Hitchborn explains that a new study, out of the University of Liverpool on histocompatabity complex (HMC), something that enables "opposites to attract" through "subtle smells" suggests that "The Pill" can alter the female olfactory sense causing women to be attracted to men with non-complimentary HMC genes. That is, women on "The Pill" seek out genetically compatible men, not their genetic desirable opposites. This unfortunate mismatch made under the heady influence of "The Pill" inhibits the creation of babies with stronger immune systems and can lead to miscarriage, infertility... and the breakdown of relationships when women go off The Pill and come to their senses about Mr. Wonderful.

With a straight face, Hitchborn informs us that the Liverpool study was performed on about 100 women who sniffed the unwashed t-shirts of 100 men. At least American taxpayers weren't dunned for this fetish study.

Hitchborn ends his lecture:

As if women really needed any other reason to stay as far away from the pill as possible, not only does The Pill kill babies and cause serious health problems, it could doom relationships as well.

******
American Life League founder Judie Brown has spent nearly 40 years on a perpetual road trip to ban contraception in the US. (She has 3 children.) Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood are the dirt beneath her tires. Go here to read "Who Was Margaret Sanger." Go here to read the ALL/STOPP (Stop Planned Parenthood, a subsidiary of ALL) plan to run Planned Parenthood out of your town and contraception out of your body. Mrs. Brown's diatribes are many. Some of the wackier ones against lesbians and The Little Mermaid were shot into the ether years ago. My current favorite Brown-o-Gram is Contraception is Not the Answer where she blames the "destruction" of the American family on birth control, henpecked men, and The Simpsons.

ALL subscribes to , among other things, Pope John Paul II's ideas on "sexual communion" and its evil twin, "sexual degradation" via unnatural family planning found in his Familiaris Consortio, a tome that could only be written by a man who either never progressed beyond Robert of Arbrissel or never got laid (or is too old to remember it).
We recognize that the practice of contraception violates the principles of Natural Law which are understandable by the use of reason alone. We endorse the consistent Catholic teachings on this subject and specifically cite Pope John Paul II’s definition of these differences in (Section 32):
When couples, by means of recourse to contraception, separate these two meanings [the unitive and procreative purposes of the marriage act] that God the creator has inscribed in the being of man and woman and in the dynamism of their sexual communion, they act as "arbiters" of the divine plan and they "manipulate" and degrade human sexuality and with it themselves and their married partner by altering its value of "total" self-giving. Thus the innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife is overlaid, through contraception, by an objectively contradictory language, namely, that of not giving oneself totally to the other. This leads not only to a positive refusal to be open to life, but also to a falsification of the inner truth of conjugal love, which is called upon to give itself in personal totality.
In 1996, as part of its mission to restore prudery and sexual order to the continental United States, The American Life League teamed up with the American Center for Law and Justice, the National Council for Adoption, The Tennessee Eagle Forum, the Christian Coalition of Tennessee, the Family Research Council and other bastard-hating diseputables, as a Doe v Sundquist amicus, in the unsuccessful attempt to overturn Tennessee's semi-open records law. Regrettably, I don't have a copy of its brief. It's safe to assume, however, that ALL argued records access would hike abortion...and, no doubt cause women to gobble up ungodly amounts of Pills; thus snuffiing the American gene pool with stuffed-nosed bad decisions. Soon afterward, Brown's teenage daughter brought forth a son with no husband, conceived while Judie was on the road bashing bastards and their moms. No adoption and sealed records for HER grandson! No secrets and shame for HER daughter! The unfortunate child gets paraded around ALL events as an abortion survivor, that is, as a child born after Roe. (NOTE: I've misplaced my sources on this last part, and will link it when it's retrieved.)

******
Where does all this moral flim-flammery leave those lusty non-Pill-boggled women, whose super gene children were and continue to be sent off to better acceptable climes? Weren't these women practicing their clear-nosed prerogative to mate with non-complimentary male gene carriers? With the superior choices at hand, shouldn't those relationships, bolstered by high class DNA, have been rewarded? Shouldn't they have ended with a trip down the aisle and happy-ever-after instead of a one-way backroad cab ride to Saint Margaret of Cortona Maternity Home and Camp for Bad Girls? The pilltotallers and bareback riders obviously followed the ALL directive (even if they didn't know it) and copulated with the "perfect mate" to create genetically superior material. They didn't even get a smelly t-shirt for comfort or thanks.

As the great protector of women and babies the American Life League sure sounds like its pushing its own brand of bete noir: genetics in its war on contraception. And let's not even talk about "Darwinism."

ADDENDUM: For a good essay on the consequences of polluted thinking such as ALL, go to Motherhood Deleted, A Realistic View on "Abstinence Only"

Saturday, August 30, 2008

JAMES DOBSON CRIES ME A RIVER

NOTE: This is cross-posted from my main blog, The Daily Bastardette.

The American Adoption Industry once more comes begging: Give me your child, lest I die."

The latest panhandler is snake oil preacher, psychologist, adopter, and dog beater Dr. James Dobson. A couple days ago Dobson's Focus on the Family daily email newsletter Citizen Link posted the scary (to some) headline: Legalized Abortion Drives Down Adoption Rates."

Dr. Dobson, or rather his ghostwriter, complains:

Adoption rates in the U.S. have plummeted since abortion became legal in 1973, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Get out your hankies, folks. It gets worse

According to the CDCP before 1973 nearly 9% of babies born to never-married women were "placed" for adoption. By 2002 the number dropped to about 1%.

Then (surprise!) NCFA weighs in:

Chuck Johnson, vice president of the National Council for Adoption, said that creates a sad situation for the thousands of families waiting to adopt.

"Americans' attitudes about adoption have remained positive," he told Family News in Focus. "(Unfortunately) with that has come a decrease in the number of women considering adoption.”

For what it's worth, Mr. Johnson isn't quoted as saying that this lack of newborn adoptables for the desperate and childless is a "sad situation," Dobson's mouthpiece says Johnson says it is. (Say it isn't so, Chuck!)

Weirdly, this "sad situation" is then directly tied to Focus on the Family's adoptee conversion-o-matic Orphan Care Initiative which we are urged to click on. Here we find happy-faced minority boys blowing bubble gum and a cute little white girl in slightly pagan face paint waiting patiently for their Forever Families to arrive. According to the page, 127,000 of these happy older urchins can be yours (if you're the right kind) for the asking.

So why isn't Dobson yelling, "Demand for Newborns Drives Down Foster Care Adoption Rates"? Why does he want to create more "legal orphans, out of newborns (and fetuses) who have perfectly fine parents ready and willing to rear them, when there are already boxcars of kids who might actually need to be adopted and are so desperate for a home that they've turned to Focus on the Family for assistance?

Cynically, we know that HWIs (or even HBIs and HHIs, HAIs and HHAIs) are the desired and most profit- generated product. We can't get away from that. But at the end of the day, it's not about adoption, and it's not really about abortion (even when it is). It's about the patriarchial impotence of female autonomy, bodily ownership, and who controls fertility and the baybee market.

These guys can't stand the thought that women execute reproductive parenting, and moral agency over their bodies, themselves, and their children, and dare to just say no to the "adoption option."

After an initial drop in adoption post Roe, adoption rates readjusted. Since then abortion has had barely a blip on adoption rates. In fact, abortion rates are the lowest they have been in 30 years, and domestic adoption rates, though they fluctuate from year to year, remain pretty steady. (Go here for an explanation on the difficulty of gathering adoption stats and here for older stats.) Contraception, acceptance and de-stigmatization of non-maritial sex and single motherhood/fatherhood, state aid (though ever-shrinking), informal "adoption" amongst kin or friends, paternal custody, and the growing unpopularity of state marriage amongst straight couples are the main reasons most unmarried parents reject surrender of their newborns. Married couples, of course, are a generally untapped product source, but are even less likely to surrender than their fornicating brethern and sistern. Anyway, who gives away their own flesh and blood? Though USians are adoption friendly to the nth degree, the concept of turning your OWN kid over to the adoption mill is as foreign an idea as haggis for breakfast.

The conflation of foster care and newborn relinquishment is necessary, however, to pull off the child distribution social engineering for-their-own-good scam so beloved by the christo-socialist adoption industry, cultural go-gooders, and woman haters. But, Dobson is chump change next to the National Council for Adoption's grand scheme which hauls original birth certificate access into foster-newborn discourse. According to NCFA president and conspiracy theorist Tom Atwood's "How Mandatory Openess Harms Adoption" published in NCFA's Adoption Fact Book IV [pdf] (p 461-468):

Fifth: Mandatory openness reduces the number of adoptions and increases the number of children in foster care. Eliminating privacy in adoption would mean that women with unplanned, out-of-wedlock births, who would only choose adoption if it were confidential, would have no choice but to single-parent. Social science data clearly reveals that the more single parents there are the more children languish in foster care with greatly increased cost to the child, family, and tax payer as a result. Forcing women to parent when when they are not ready to do so leads to more children in foster care as evidenced by the large increases in the foster care rolls, that have occurred, as the number of infant adoptions dramatically declined over the last 30 years. (p 465)

Let's get this straight.

Newborn adoption surrenders have plummeted since Roe v Wade, but foster care rates have skyrocketed.

Shamed and fearful women who earlier would have surrendered their newborns with "guaranteed" anonymity (sealed obcs) now haven o other "choice" than to keep and raise their dirty secrets in plain sight and will abuse them as a result.

Unsurrendered newborns are likely to end up in foster care

Women who refuse to incubate for the desperate and childless are selfish.

Ungrateful bastards (and their fellow-traveller first parents and aparents) cause child abuse and high taxes.

Does your head hurt yet?

Even Dr Pierce couldn't come up with something this deranged!

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

PATRICK JOHNSTON IN COLORADO

Imagine my surprise when I found an article about Patrick Johnston in the Colorado Independent--with a picture from Theoconia (the one on the left). The article, Colorado Personhood Law Backer Linked to Militant Anti-Abortion Groups, is one of a series on Colorado's proposed Amendment 48--the Human Life Amendment--which if passed would confer constitutional rights to fertilized human eggs. More precisely, it would add the following language to Section 1 of the Colorado State Constitution:

Section 31. Person defined. As used in sections 3, 6, and 25 of Article II of the state constitution, the terms "person" or "persons" shall include any human being from the moment of fertilization.

And who is up to his neck this campaign, but... Patrick Johnston.

I haven't followed the Amendment 48 campaign, so I shall refrain from commenting. I do, however, believe that for people who care about these things, we need to know that what happens in Central Ohio doesn't stay in Central Ohio. Dave Daubenmire and the Minutemen, Mark Harrington and the Center for Bio-ethical Reform, and GAP...and Dr. Patrick Johnson all have legs. And they travel.

The author of the article, Wendy Norris, has done her homework. I actually recognize where she has picked up most of her material. I disagree with her on a couple points, including the existence of the Army of God. It's 's such a treat, however, to find a homegrown theonomist featured in a publication half-way across the country, mucking around in somebody elses' business that I need to pass the word along, no matter what the quibble.

Here is an excerpt:

James Patrick Johnston, D.O., is, by all appearances, a polite country doctor in south-central Ohio, husband and father of six children under the age of 10 with a new baby on the way. A self-avowed "life, liberty, and jobs" guy, he lost his 2007 bid for a seat in the Ohio General Assembly, where he ran on a plank of cutting taxes, expanding homeschooling and "making Ohio the first state in the Union to defy Roe v. Wade with a statewide abortion ban."

Less obvious are his links to some of the most radical elements of the anti-abortion movement — the paramilitary groups Army of God, Christian Gallery and Minutemen United that have been at the forefront of advocating for and celebrating violent clashes between anti-abortion forces and clinics.

The path leading from Johnston's activism in poor Appalachian Ohio to the hotbed of wealthy religious conservatism in Colorado exemplifies the fluid interchange between the more radical anti-abortion movement and those seeking to shield their past associations in order to appear more mainstream.

The whole series is well worth the read. You never know when "theological" weirdness is coming our way.

The articles can also be found at Unbossed.com