Entanglement between evangelical churches and adoption industry

I've been hoping someone would look into this story for ages, ever since my fundie brother adopted two kids over 15 years ago and spoke of it as something many people in his acquaintance were doing. I knew somebody had to be making money. Finally there's a book:

The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption
by Kathryn Joyce

Publication Date: April 23, 2013
Adoption has long been enmeshed in the politics of abortion. But as award-winning journalist Kathryn Joyce makes clear in The Child Catchers, adoption has lately become entangled in the conservative Christian agenda. To tens of millions of evangelicals, adoption has become a new front in the culture wars: a test of "pro-life" bonafides, a way to reinvent compassionate conservatism on the global stage, and a means to fulfill the “Great Commission” mandate that Christians evangelize the nations. Influential leaders fervently promote a new "orphan theology," urging followers to adopt en masse, with little thought for the families these "orphans" may actually have. Christian adoption activists have added moral weight to a multi-billion dollar adoption industry intent on increasing the "supply" of adoptable children, both at home and overseas.

The Child Catchers is a shocking exposé of what the adoption industry has become and how it got there, told through deep investigative reporting and the heartbreaking stories of individuals who found that their own, and their children's, well-being was ultimately irrelevant in a market driven by profit and now, pulpit command.

Kathryn Joyce is a journalist based in New York City whose work has appeared in the Nation, Mother Jones, Slate, the Atlantic, and other publications. A 2011 recipient of the Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion, she has also been awarded residencies and fellowship support by the Nation Institute Investigative Fund, the MacDowell Colony, the Bellagio Center, and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. She is the author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement and associate editor at Religion Dispatches.

Some cultural things just go on and on and on

When I was a little kid in the early 1960s -- 6, 7, 8 years old -- the hip electronic item for the home was the hi-fi. This was a large wooden cabinet six or seven feet long, containing a turntable, an amplifier and radio, and large cabinet speakers. (See this image, where an example sits in the center.) And to play on their hi-fis, middle-class people bought LPs. If they were educated, or just culturally aspiring, they might buy opera and symphony records; if they were only lightly-educated, and staid middle class people like my parents, they bought Broadway cast LPs and a series of curious recordings called Sing Along With Mitch.

(Just as a reference, while my parents bought those dubious pop records, my wife's parents, who were immigrants but understood what culture was in a way my own parents never did, bought opera and symphony records, and my wife sings arias around the house to this day.)

On each Mitch Miller recording was a dozen or so standards sung by a male chorus accompanied by a sprightly orchestra. Mostly folk songs or songs from the turn of the century, like "Peg O' My Heart," "The Sidewalks of New York," "Sweet Rosie O'Grady," "Makin' Whoopie," and so on. I was a little kid and liked to sing, and the whole point of these records was that you were supposed to sing along, so they contained full lyric sheets, and that way I learned these moldy songs by heart. They struck me even then as utterly of the past, because even when I was 8 (C.E. 1964) I was listening almost literally religiously to Top 40 radio and memorizing those songs too ("I Want to Hold Your Hand," "Satisfaction," "House of the Rising Sun" and so on), and the difference was obvious, even to a little kid.

At that time "The Lawrence Welk Show" was not a syndicated museum piece as it is now, but still a regularly broadcast television program on a major network, ABC. My grandmother would simply not miss this show, with its happy-faced Barbie-and-Ken-doll cast singing mostly the same ancient songs (e.g. on YouTube: "The Beer Barrel Polka;" "Big Rock Candy Mountain"). This show, which drew from more or less the same songbook as Mitch Miller, seemed even stranger -- not just a similarly weird, old-fashioned indulgence, but an actively sinister force -- if you watched it, I felt, you would find yourself growing elderly by the minute.

Thirty-five years later, my wife's mother landed in an Alzheimer's care home, where one of the social activities was listening to live music. The music consisted of a person with an accordion playing those same old songs -- literally the same old songs, "Sidewalks of New York" and so on. Now if that was nostalgic music to my grandmother, who was maybe 10 years old in 1900, what was it supposed to represent to people 40 years younger than her, people who were, say, 70 in 2000? Why weren't they playing the Big Band music of the 1940s, which would be to those folks what the Lawrence Welk songbook would have been to my grandmother? Why, in fact, weren't they playing the classical music my wife's mother had chosen to buy and listen to when she had the choice?

Even more mind-bendingly, this year I visited the Assisted Living facility where my own mother was living. And they had a man playing accordion, and he still played the same songs, including "Sidewalks of New York" and "Sweet Rosie O'Grady." WTF. Is there like a Nursing Home Songbook, with the same 25 numbers in it? I am really concerned about this. When I wind up in a freaking Assisted Living Facility in 20 or 30 years, they still better not be playing those same fucking songs; they better be playing some Beatles and Rolling Stones, or some accordion player is going to get bopped by my walker. Of course by then the accordion player will be robotic.

All this came to mind when I saw this jaw-dropping bit on Mediaite: On his own television program on his own network, ancient Pat Robertson hosted Condaleeza Rice, and when she suggested that "mac and cheese" was a wonderful holiday food, Robertson blurted out:

What is this "Mac and Cheese," is that a black thing?

And I thought, how the hell does this thing that is the 700 Club, and the Trinity Broadcast Network, survive? It's not like it's in syndication like the Welk show. (And for the record, at least on the Welk show they sang numbers from the 1940s and 50s and even contemporary numbers like -- God help us, I'm not kidding -- "One Toke Over the Line.") Who in the hell is giving money to this ancient fraud Robertson and the desperately out-of-touch worldview espoused on his network?

Then I realized -- things that somehow contain and epitomize cultural moments and worldviews, even if they do it terribly, just go on and on. It's like the culture as a whole needs these things as ballast, to balance out emanations like "TMZ" and the CW. Not that I claim to know the mechanism of how that works.

Dramatic conflict

Hanging out with Cris in the morning while she makes a cheesecake to take to a dinner she's invited to. She was talking about her aunt, who lives in the city and whom we used to take to Golden Gate Park every Sunday to feed the feral cats. (I was thinking about that period of our lives the other day. The period of taking Aunt Dora to the park lasted several years, and while it was going on it seemed as if it would never end. But it did end, when the feral cat population dropped below that which required a Sunday evening visit [though Dora still went in the mornings], and now I can't even remember when it ended -- at least two years ago.)

Cris began talking about the other cat ladies who also went to the park to feed the feral population. The cat ladies of the park don't form as close an alliance as you'd think. It takes a certain kind of person to be so invested in the welfare of feral cats that they go every day to the park and into the bushes to the protected places, behind fallen logs and such, where the cats like to be fed. Such a person is likely to be more comfortable around cats than people, and each has her own ideas about what each cat wants or needs, whether it is a candidate for adoption, and so on. Thus the relationship between the cat ladies is more like a détente than a friendship. They help each other sometimes, but other times have a beef with one another over territorial or tactical issues. One woman, whom I'll call Penny, befriended Dora for several years, but now they're on the outs.

Cris went on to tell me that Penny had a husband who hated cats. "Not allergic to cats, or indifferent to them, but someone who thinks that cats are a curse, are vermin. How could someone who loves cats marry someone like that?"

I said it was an interesting dramatic conflict, to marry someone who hates what you love. Is there some condition, I said, where music actually causes physical pain -- like something Oliver Sacks might write about. What if that person were to fall in love with a musician? That could make an interesting story.

Unless you're Patricia Highsmith, who published a whole book of short stories centering around pets (which sounds horrible unless you know that Highsmith never wrote sentimentally). Then you would definitely make it about cats.

Update: Just found an article from this spring about one of the people who feed feral cats in Golden Gate Park.

World's greatest sad

While browsing the New York Times site, I was treated to a popup advertisement for something. In the 30-second ad, a teenage girl sitting in a bright bedroom typed the words "You're the World's Greatest Dad" into her smartphone. There followed several morphing animated scenes of a cartoon girl and her dad winning races, playing in the treehouse he'd built for her, and so on. At the end the ad goes back to "real life," showing the late-middle-aged father sitting alone in a dark book-lined study receiving the message on a laptop and apparently chuckling in pleasure.

But I thought, good God, look at this. Here's this girl texting her father. Clearly they're living apart now, in different houses. And he's sitting alone in this dark study -- it has to be his home, as he's wearing a lavender-colored v-neck sweater -- staring down at his laptop. He isn't working. This email from his daughter is basically the only thing he seems to have to occupy himself with. Is he chuckling at the end of the commercial, or crying?

Oh, and I missed noticing what product was being promoted.

Today's fake: woman faked her son's cancer to glom donations

An unemployed Detroit-area woman faked a cancer diagnosis for her 12-year-old son so she could solicit donations, including $7500 from a church fundraiser. As part of the scam, she shaved his head and eyebrows and drugged him so he would appear lethargic. She told him he had leukemia. She's facing fraud and child abuse charges.

Klamath Falls to SF

I've been out of town for a week, driving up to see my mother in suburban Portland. There, in addition to family duties, I worked for a day out of my company's downtown Portland office, and went to lunch with co-workers. That gave me the opportunity to discover the lunch trucks of downtown Portland. Anyplace there's a parking lot, two or three or eight trucks, trailers and carts are set up to serve a variety of foods, everything from Thai to Mexican. It had been several years since I'd been to downtown Portland during a workday, so this was a pleasant surprise to me.

While we were standing on the sidewalk waiting for our orders and talking in loud voices about new features of the next software release, a couple of hippie punks walked by, the boy intentionally brushing my shoulder and arm as he went past as if to tell me we were taking up too much room on the sidewalk. Being a cluster of four men, we probably were taking up too much room, frankly. I looked up in surprise at the glancing blow but it wasn't enough for me to make an issue of. If it had been enough to jar me off-balance, maybe. Anyway, I was amused by the fact that I am now a fat middle-aged businessman in a polo shirt being twitted by the same kind of hippie punk I was thirty years ago.

The next day, having posted on Twitter about being in an office building in downtown Portland, I was contacted by my friends Chris and Debora, who live in the southern California high desert but happened to be sub-letting in Portland for the month. Cris and I got together with them, had lunch, and went to the Portland Japanese Garden. What a nice break from family stuff!

In between breaks from family stuff, we spent time with my mother and her husband Tom. He is a typical old-man grouchy Republican who loves to bait me with lines like "Ya know, illegal aliens run California." Since the Democratic Convention was on all week long, he had to sit and watch it. The best moment was when Obama was speaking and Tom intoned, "'Change, change!' Change from what? He never says what change" and Obama promptly said, "Now let me tell you exactly what change I am talking about."

Now we're in Klamath Falls, where a cool wind is blowing. We missed a heat wave in the San Francisco Bay Area and we'll be back there tonight. Thanks, Katia, for the cat sitting!

technorati: Klamath Falls

Focus on the Fundies: Creepy story of the month

Some fundies in Colorado Springs (where else?) stage a bizarre "Father-Daughter Purity Ball" annually -- this was the tenth annual such rite -- which judging from the photo seems to involve using a cross like a maypole. And is that a crown of thorns they're doing ring-toss with?

A twirling mass of white lace surrounded a rough wooden cross as a troupe of young women danced in a circle looking like porcelain dolls come to life.

Then Randy Wilson and Kevin Moore hoisted swords in the air and a ballroom full of 149 fathers and daughters walked beneath them toward the cross and laid white roses at its base. The swords symbolized the fathers' commitment to battle for their daughters and the roses symbolized the daughters' commitment to God to remain pure.

Then Wilson announced, "Let the ball begin."

Good Christ, what are these people on? Of course, they has a website, which contains this strange passage:

The Father Daughter Purity Ball is a memorable ceremony for fathers to sign commitments to be responsible men of integrity in all areas of purity. The commitment also includes their vow to protect their daughters in their choices for purity. The daughters silently commit to live pure lives before God through the symbol of laying down a white rose at the cross.

Yes... They live in a fantasy world where women are still chattel and cannot legally sign anything, so the men sign the documents and the girls "silently commit" to the deal.

There is something else mentioned in the story, an organization called the Abstinence Clearinghouse. I'll let you Google that for yourself, but the mind boggles. "What do they clear??" Cris asked. "A clearinghouse is a place where accounting takes place... Do they have a database of all the virgins or something?"

But the best quote from the news story is:

(The family who started the event) say most in the mainstream media see their family as a fundamentalist freak show.

You think?!

technorati: fundamentalists, Colorado Springs, celibacy

With an internet like this, who needs family?

Like the Earth, the Web is a less appealing place than it used to be. If I want attitude and arguing and meanness and profanity and wrong information screamed at me as gospel, I'll get in a time machine and spend Christmas with my family in 1977.

-- writer J.R. Moehringer

And from a profile of Gay Talese in the LA Times' book blog comes this related factoid: The "first thing" he learned from his editor at the New York Times -- where, in the 1950s, telephones were "new technology" -- was "never use them" (the phones). Talese's anecdote is not elaborated, but I guess his old editor meant, never use the telephone when you can report in person.

Spring wind

It was hot last weekend, and the cool air off the ocean came back on Sunday night -- so far, so good. But then it never stopped, and by yesterday the cold wind was positively howling in. We went to Office Max, and there was a little whirligig of garbage in the parking lot -- very unpleasant. The springtime's like that sometime.

Today it's Cris's sister Shirley's birthday. We're hosting chez nous. Cris has been trying to make flan, and after two spoiled flans she thinks she's going to get it right the third time.

technorati: San Francisco weather