Oh No!!! Dr. Bill!

OH NOOOOOO, DR. BILL!!!!
Oh Nooooooo, Dr. Bill! is a regular column by BN Executive Chair Marley Greiner, in which she comments on the NCFA and occasionally other opponents of Open Records. If you have an NCFA anecdote you’d like to share, please send it to Marley at maddogmarley@worldnet.att.net

MARY HAD A LITTLE GIRL

(This article appeared in the Winter 1999 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)

Whore: (1) a woman who engages in sexual acts for money; a promiscuous or immoral woman; (2) a male who engages in sexual acts for money or (3) a venal or unscrupulous person. To whore: to have unlawful sexual intercourse as or with a whore (2) to pursue a faithless unworthy or idolatrous desire. The Webster Dictionary

Dear Bill:

This past February I was approached by a reporter for a major national newsmagazine who was writing an article on open records, Oregon’s M58 and Bastard Nation. During one of our conversations, he mentioned that you had complained to him "at least 14 times" about the use of the word "whore" on the Bastard Nation webpage. I can understand why you’d be vexed by the exploding head (you have seen it, haven’t you?), but I simply had no recollection of anybody calling you a whore.

Not wanting to offend the country’s Voice of Adoption, I asked BN co-founder and webmistress Damsel Plum to do a sweep of the BN site to ferret out the offending word. After much toil and trouble she discovered the following whorish citations: birthmother Jackie Patrick’s reference to herself as "Court Jester, Founder: Birthwhore Nation", adoptee Lesli LaRocco’s suggestion to Ms. Patrick that she drop the offending W-word and replace it with "Slutvokia" (which do you prefer?); a nursery rhyme parody "Mary Had A Little Girl;" and finally a reference to "whoredom" in birthmother Amy Bredes’s essay "Preparing for Contact."

Your discomfort with this perfectly acceptable word is similar to your discomfort with another word: BASTARD, or as you so amusingly referred to us in the July/August 1998 issue of National Adoption Reports, B*st*rd. Just what is it that upsets people so much about language, when the real problems of adoption in the US today—sealed records, secrecy, cultural shame, lack of regulation and accountability, and the economic and emotional exploitation of the triad—are brushed under the kitchen rug like the dead cockroach you spot just as your mother rings the doorbell? The impulse to silence, to censor, what is. And what is, is bastardy, birthmothers and (frequently) infertile adoptive parents—the shamed-based "dysfunctional" system which the Adoption Industry promoters of secrecy perpetuate to guarantee their fat bankroll, not to mention a nice little S&M niche in the ever-increasing Pathology Industry that breaks things so they can fix them back up. It is what Michel Foucault calls the logic of power: an injunction of nonexistence, manifestation, and silence. In other words, if the language of bastardy is forbidden in public discourse, the ability to explain the mistreatment of the triad—especially adoptees and birthparents—is wiped out. If bastardy and its legal and social implications are annulled, then the reactionary Adoption Industry, which organizations such as the NCFA represents, can continue its course of abrogating the Constitutional rights of adopted people and stripping them of their civic dignity. By denying the words and concept of bastardy, the inequities of the system cease to exist, and adoptees can just snuggle in their pink or blue blankets, grateful they didn’t end up in a trash compactor next to Jimmy Hoffa.

Instead of worrying about a few harmless jokes and words on the Bastard Nation webpage, Bill, I’d be shooting rats closer to home. Take for instance your friend Pat Robertson, whose ACLJ took a bath with Doe v Sundquist (a court case re. TN semi-open records law.) Robertson had quite a bit to say about the whorish behavior of the entire class of unmarried mothers who keep their children. During a July 1996 discussion of Doe v. Sundquist on the 700 Club, Robertson said of unmarried mothers, " These girls are not stupid. If you want to pay them five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred, eight hundred dollars a month, they’ll have babies. And if they’ll stop paying them, they'll stop having babies. It’s that simple." Sounds to me like he’s calling them welfare whores. Did you voice a complaint over that?

Gigolo: (1) a man supported by a woman usually in return for his attention; (2) dancing partner or male escort.

It is no secret, Bill. The NCFA’s sole raison d'etre is the obsession of the big bucks Adoption Industry, led by the Gladney Center, to keep adoption records sealed even though the organization represents only about 3.5% of the adoption agencies operating in the US today. Even staid and straight agencies consider the NCFA a dinosaur that needs to be put to rest in the Museum of Lost Causes next to Prohibition, the Silver Standard, and Harold Stassen. Out of the 127 member agencies listed on the NCFA webpage (http://www.ncfa-us.org) 55 are Latter Day Saint (Mormon) agencies and another 11 are Gladney operations including a recently opened New York branch on Central Park West. While Catholic Charity agencies, once a bulwark of NCFA support, are dropping membership as fast as Calvin Klein dropped his last ad campaign, slick new kids like Adoption Associates and Children’s Adoption Services are picking up the slack. Middle-of-the-road opponents to the NCFA’s, "secrets and lies" policy who have jumped The Good Ship Edna are labeled "anti-adoption" by you. Incredulously, even Concerned Adoption Professionals, the group that opposed M58, isn't’t up to your personal snuff. The latest issue of National Adoption Reports describes CAP’s campaign as "often vague and…. contradictory." It probably didn’t help that CAP officer Lauren Greenbaum of the Boys and Girls Aid Society, in an interview in the Boston Globe, declared that passage of the ballot initiative would not do much harm. Much to my personal delight, Ms. Greenbaum, in fact, mentioned to Bastard Nation after a radio debate that Oregon agencies considered you and the NCFA persona non grata. I suppose she’s anti-adoption, too.

Ultimately, of course, it is the NCFA and Dame Edna who are anti-adoption in maintaining that adoptees are dirty little state secrets, ungrateful, angry, and dangerous.

Your pal,

Marley

Marley Greiner is Executive Chair and co-founder of Bastard Nation. She is also fascinated with Dr. Pierce and would like to make him her own someday.

*Founding Foundlings membership list page (..members/found.htm):

*Adoption Jokes page (..fun/joke.htm

*From Bastard Goose (..fun/Nursery,htm)

*Amy Bredes’s "Preparation before Contact" (..search/prep/htm)

(This article appeared in the Winter 1999 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)