This will be an opportunity for some people to inquire whether celebs adopting get special treatment or exemptions from the rules. That is a legitimate inquiry. It may also be an occasion to explore problems with, and concerns about, international adoption; that is also a completely legitimate subject, even if it is not comfortable for everyone.

However, most of the coverage will not be serious. The loudest voices will be racist assholes like the Pittsurgh Tribune’s Mike Seate, who will ask variations on “why are they adopting those ching-chong kids rather than REAL ‘MURKIN KIDS.” The loudest voices will tell rice and sumo and math jokes. The loudest voices, operating on the principle that “things I notice, or the media covers, represent a statistically significant trend,” will push the “OMG Asian babies are celebrity fashion statements!!!!” notion. The loudest voices will be sure to use language distinguishing Heigl’s baby so that nobody confuses it with a “real” daughter.

In short, the loudest voices on the topic will be douchebags.

Oh, by the way, some people will also complain that Heigl is not fit because she’s to be a working mother — working on a movie soon, to be specific. I don’t see a problem with that. She can pretty much let the kid graze at the craft services table. They’ve always got good stuff. (Unless it’s an indie movie, then it’s all vegan shit, like organic localvore rutabagas that have been grown in fertilizer made from the nightsoil of teaching assistants from the local community college’s Comp. Lit. department.) Just make sure to put the baby on the craft services table before the teamsters get there, because they always take the donuts.

Plus, there are lots of people on-set who can supervise a baby. I mean, most of these jobs are made up anyway. “Gaffer”? “Key grip”? “Best boy?” Please. Like any of those can prove that their job description doesn’t include “clean up after projectile vomiting.” If they’ve worked on a movie with Gary Busey, they probably expect it.

Plus, I have to say that having a kid will take the pressure off of Heigl for relentlessly badmouthing her directors and writers. She bad-mouthed the Grey’s Anatomy writers until [WARNING: READERS WHO ARE MY WIFE AND WAITING FOR THE SEASON FIVE DVD, READ NO FURTHER] they gave her character a brain tumor. That’s why you don’t annoy people who write; I’m just saying. Also, she whined about how demeaning some of the material in Judd Aptow movies were. Dude, it’s a Judd Aptow movie. You were expecting it to be Chekov? Anyway, my point is that her kid can take the pressure off by her by taking over some of the bad-mouthing. She could focus on just the directors and the kid could, like, have a diaper malfunction all over the executive producer, or shriek at the writers when they try to steal food to take home to their families.

I may have wandered from the point here.

So I’m always happy to learn about new adoption blogs. Thanks to an email from Martha Nichols, a writer and teacher of writing, I found two more to follow: Martha’s own new blog (in which I strongly identified with her experience of trying to get a seven-year-old to appreciate Star Trek), and a new blog called Adopt-a-Tude, with a promising and thoughtful first post about how the media treats international adoption. Check them out.

This is nothing new. The Omen series plays on the same mythic structure. The evil adopted child/stepchild/foundling is a concept as old as the evil stepmother and just as common in folklore.

So why the uproar? Well, a few reasons. First, in fairness to Warner Brothers, the adoption community is somewhat sensitive (some would say oversensitive) to slights to begin with. Why? Well, it’s because some of you are such relentlessly insensitive and ignorant assholes who don’t think before flapping your big fat mouths in front of our kids. No offense.

But second, in fairness to the adoptive parents, Orphan has been marketed in a way to play up the adopting-a-kid-is-a-scary-risk angle. The trailer dwells on the spooky orphanage and scenes within it, and emphasizes that the adopted child is alien and out of place in her new family. Of course, adoptive parents get that a lot. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll get a child with . . . problems? “Isn’t there a risk of emotional issues?” “Aren’t you worried about getting a drug-addicted baby?” Etc. Etc. Etc. (As if pushing a kid out of your vagina was insurance that the kid would grow up to be a well-adjusted brain surgeon. Ask Lionel Dahmer about that one, kids.)
The original trailer also featured a line from the titular character: “It must be hard to love an adopted child as much as your own.” There’s a line that sets our teeth on edge, and that we also hear all too often. The inclusion of that line made it seem as if Warner’s marketers were trying to demonize adoptive kids.

The adoptive community reacted in bad ways and good ways. I’m sorry to say there were calls to censor the movie — to prevent it, somehow, from being released. The fact that there was no chance of that happening does not diminish the fact that such calls for censorship are un-American and regrettable. There were also calls to exercise return speech in the marketplace of ideas — to tell Warner that they were being assholes and offending a small but extremely noisy segment of their ticket-buying audience. That approach was effective — Warner acknowledged that its marketing of the movie was sort of douchey (my words, not theirs), removed the “it must be hard to love an adoptive child” line from the trailer, and apologized. They also commented that in a world in which they get death threats for moving the date of the next Harry Potter movie, the adoption community was unusually polite in their feedback. That’s nice to know.

My kids will be bombarded with cultural messages marking them as other, different, even inferior because they are adopted. Orphan adds but one small voice to that din. I’d like them to take two messages away from this affair. The first is that they are in control of their own destinies and, by taking initiative and telling people like Warner that they are being assholes, can educate and change minds. The second is that while their feelings are valid and their own, they ought not interpret every use of an anti-adoption trope as a personal assault, any more than a stepmother should get upset at every Cinderella sequel. Sometimes a mythic-theme-driven horror movie is just a horror movie.

Many families are not so lucky. 51% of families with kids had two working parents in 1998. Some of those families, like mine, were built by adoption rather than by birth. Some were built by both.

Probate Judge Frank Willis of Van Buren County, Michigan thinks that’s just not right. Even though the law doesn’t support him, he’s out to stop it.

See, Judge Frank Willis has authority to approve — or not — adoptions in his county. And he won’t approve them unless the prospective parents sign a “moral commitment” pledging that one parent will stay home with a baby for a year, and that one parent will not work full-time during the kid’s preschool years.

Willis requires parents who adopt infants in his county to agree that one of them will be home with the baby during the first year and won’t work full time during the baby’s preschool years. Willis is perhaps the only justice in Michigan to require such a pledge, which he acknowledges is not legally binding and may be offensive and outdated to some.

Oh, ya think?

Judge Willis’ requirement is not based on any federal or Michigan or local law. He’s made it up out of whole cloth, based on his personal views on parenting. So far he’s gotten away with it. The commitment he requires, if honored, would render adoption impossible for some families. Not everyone can afford to have one parent take a year off work, or work only part-time for a few more years:

For the Shockleys, cutting in half their combined $70,000 income wasn’t an option.
“It wouldn’t have been possible to pay our mortgage and bills with one income,” Allison Shockley said.

Allison works as a financial analyst at Welch Foods Inc. in Lawton, and her husband is a technology specialist at the Kalamazoo Educational Regional Service Agency. They both worked during the infancy of their older son, Jordan, 4, who was adopted as an infant in Kalamazoo County.

Without the Shockleys’ signatures on the moral-commitment pledge, though, Willis would not put his signature on their petition to adopt.

And without the signature of the judge in the county where they live, the Shockleys’ interstate adoption through a local agency was stalled.

But, Judge Willis says, this is a matter of principle, not of finances.

Or wait. Maybe not.

Willis said he does not require the pledge from adoptive parents of foster children, children with special needs or children from other countries. He restricts the requirement to parents adopting babies born in this country because “this is a babies’ market; that’s where the waiting list is.”

Oh. So it’s market-driven. Willis wants adoption of the sought-after babies to be limited to families with sufficient resources to have one parent stay home with them.

Look, there are perfectly colorable arguments that children are better off with one parent at home with them. There’s a perfectly colorable argument that people work longer and harder because they want to buy things that aren’t necessary. But, to be blunt, that’s none of Judge Willis’ damn business. There’s no law in Michigan restricting adoption to one-working-parent families. It’s questionable whether anyone would support such a law, and not entirely clear that it would pass constitutional muster. Willis is an oathbreaker. He took an oath to uphold the laws and constitution of his state, and he’s pissing on that oath by using the power of his office to enforce his personal extra-legal social and moral views. That’s highlighted by his calling this a “moral commitment” and pointing out that it is not enforceable. That’s no damn excuse. He has no business enforcing moral rules from the bench whether or not the parents can break their word without consequence. His job is to enforce and apply legal rules. Willis’ behavior is the essence of tyranny and the antithesis of the rule of law. The Court of Appeals and the state Commission on Judicial Performance need to slap him down.

(Via Alicia, a member of our adoption forum.)

“The decision came down to residency requirement and the fact that the judge believes she was being well taken care of in the orphanage,” said Zione Ntaba, a spokeswoman for the Malawi Justice Department.

“For the Malawians, the fact that the child is at an orphanage, is being taken care of and is going through the school education system, that does qualify as the best interests of a child,” Ntaba added.

Predictably, this is generating two species of asshattery. Species one: the sentiment that all international adoption is the product of the accessory-seeking whims of flighty rich white people. Species two: the sentiment that this is a terrible decision, because of course the child would have a “better life” with Madonna.

Certainly the child would have a more materially fortunate life with the Material Girl. (OK, sorry.) But the question of whether that life would be “better” in other ways lies at the heart of the dilemma of international adoption. Without diving headlong into the question today, I submit this: the child’s life would not be “better” in a way that justifies exempting an aging pop star from Malawi’s residency requirements or otherwise ignoring Malawi’s sovereign right to oversee the adoption and welfare of its children.

Paula at Heart, Mind, and Seoul — an adult adoptee and adoptive parent whose writings on international adoption issues should not be missed if you are interested in the topic — has a good take on this, in which she decries the “how can you enforce residency rules when this is best for the child” sentiments and reasonably questioning why Madonna can’t just hang out in Malawi long enough to satisfy the residency requirement if she is committed to this child. Getting a child — whether through labor or adoption — is not calculated to be convenient or easy, so why should we expect that it will be? As I’ve argued before, adoption ought not be all about the parent.

The letter writer identifies the problem with coy or ambiguous responses designed to deflect the questions:

I’ve tried asking with the slightest of remonstrance “Excuse me?” but, of course, that just led them to believe that I couldn’t hear what was being asked, and the question was repeated even more loudly.

Miss Manners offers admirable advice, which amounts (in pleasant Miss Manners speak) to responding to rude questions with “Why, it’s because fuck off!”

Nosy people have already proven themselves to be rude, so you should hardly expect them to make tactful remarks. The important thing is to cut them off at the first question. The only explanation necessary is, “That’s personal.”

Miss Manners also aptly reminds us that assuming a general approach of civility and decency does not mean we must license all of the crapweasels of the world to walk all over us:

But you must also teach your daughters not to fall for two common arguments: that curiosity is natural and that people who don’t disclose personal information must be ashamed of it. Dignified people value their privacy, and being curious is no excuse for demanding that it be satisfied. Under such pressure, they should merely smile and repeat “That’s personal” as often as necessary.

Brava.

Anyway, she’s already had her first appointment and picked up her week’s supply of ludicrously expensive, sodium-and-preservative rich food-analogue-products. (As near as I can tell, Jenny is flirting with the hypothesis that cell death from sodium poisoning will cause weight loss. You could set some of this stuff out for deer to lick.) She showed me one of the dishes the other night. “It’s nice they give you an amuse bouche to start with” I say. No, that was the entire dinner. Since I’m in a different weight class, the one good J.C. classifies as “planetoid,” I’ll get to eat more every day. But unless I get to line up nine or ten of those entrees like tequila shots on a bar, I’m going to be gnawing the pillows by the weekend.

This is a roundabout way of mentioning that I’m fat. I’m a fat adoptive parent. In some places, as recent news shows, this is an anaomly, as adoption agencies and authorities have health restrictions for adoptive parents that include weight restrictions. Yet somehow our busy friend Matt Drudge saw fit to announce breathlessly on his front page that a family had been excluded from adoption because the husband was too fat.

Damien and Charlotte Hall were told to reapply once Mr Hall, who weighs 24 stone, had slimmed down.

The couple, who do not drink or smoke, have accused Leeds City Council of ignoring their parenting skills and denying a child a loving home.

They approached the council about adoption because they cannot have children of their own, but were told that Mr Hall’s weight made them ineligible, because of the risk that he could become ill or die.

The 37-year-old call centre worker from Leeds must cut his body mass (BMI) index to below 40 and prove he can keep the weight off for the couple to be considered. He currently has a BMI of more than 42, classifying him as morbidly obese.

24 stone, for those of you who do not live in a country where they still measure things by reference to various forms of rubble, is about 336 pounds. That’s a much bigger planetoid than I am. And I’m a good distance from BMI 42, thankfully, though nowhere near as far away as I should be.

To me, it seems self-evident that someone with a condition with “morbidly” in the title, whether or not the condition is “voluntary” or “involuntary,” is questionably qualified to adopt a child. But people like the Halls and their supporters assert that they have a right to adopt a child despite this level of obesity, that Mr. Hall can still parent, that they can love a child who needs a home, and that the restriction simply reflects a commonly accepted social prejudice against fat people. I have no doubt that Mr. Hall is capable of loving a child and being a good parent by any number of measures. But I also have no trouble with adoption agencies — and governments — setting requirements for adoptive parents reasonably calculated to ensure that every child is adopted into a home with healthy and capable parents who do not pose a unusually high risk of stroking out when the kid is in junior high.

Certainly some adoption requirements are motivated by social prejudices that do not warrant respect. I have very low regard for states that prohibit adoption by same-sex couples, which strike me as questionably related to actual child welfare and more related to enforcing social norms. And China’s ban on parents with “severe facial deformity” is probably a reflection of that culture’s regrettable attitude towards visible disability or difference. But someone who is morbidly obese is much more likely to die early, or suffer substantial health problems, than someone who is not. That’s a medical fact; it would exist whether or not our society had decided that Paris Hilton and Kiera Knightly represented reasonable beauty ideals. Adoption agencies and governments setting adoption requirements are entitled, legally and morally, to restrict adoption to reasonably healthy parents, as determined by reasonably available and workable criteria.

Some of the outrage about eligibility limits on adoptive parents carry a dangerous tone — the tone of entitlement. People like the Hills feel they are entitled to a child in the care of the state, and that thus the adoption process should be as accommodating and “non-discriminatory” as the application for a library card. But children placed for adoption are not anyone’s entitlement. The entitled attitude encourages the commodification of children, which is already enough of a problem in both domestic and international adoption. People like the Hills offer a similarly problematical chord when they trot out the “I just want to give a needy child a home” argument. First, this argument plays into the parent-as-savior complex that offends self-aware adoptive parents, who recognize that viewing your child as lucky to have you is the exact opposite of the way a principled adoptive parent should view the situation. Second, the argument lends itself to the view that adoptive children are strictly second-class, and ought to he happy for what they can get — that restrictions on suitability on adoptive parents are inappropriate when children ought just be thankful to have a roof over their head. Once again, this is a vision of an adoptive child as a supplicant rather than a family member, and is a terribly unhealthy foundation for a family relationship.

And so, though I am interested in discussions of whether eligibility requirements are rational, I make no pretense to suggesting that everyone should be eligible to adopt. I’m not morbidly obese — I’m probably 8 BMI points behind Mr. Hill — but an agency or government could rationally and morally eschew me in favor of a physically fit parent. Most American adoption agencies will not refuse me because I take anti-depressants, and I view that as a rational decision, but when China made me ineligible I recognized that this was their call based on their medical and psychological judgment. It’s not the judgment that I’d make, and I’d argue against it given the opportunity, but it’s not irrational or unscientific, like their sad cultural hang-up about facial deformity. The truth is, I’m not much of a parent if I stop taking my meds.

Adoption is not about me and my right to self-realization, and I ought not expect it to be.

And we can’t have that.

Rest in peace, Lark Previn — I’m sure you will be mourned by your parents just as profoundly as any biological child would have been.

For a change of pace, Russel D. Moore takes the same stimulus — obnoxious questions about whether his kids are really brothers — and turns it into a moving and inspiring meditation on brotherhood and of Biblical analogies to adoption. I don’t agree with all of it — including his passing swipe at infertility treatments — but it is well worth reading.

Edit: As Katrina points out, I also disagree with his decision not to teach kids about birth culture.

Courtesy of Ungrateful Little Bastard:

And then it happened. The question I’ve been dreading, preparing for, anticipating since 2005:

“Mama, why did my Chinese mother not stay with me forever? Did she want to stay with me forever?”

I haven’t gotten this precise question, though I’ve gotten ones uncomfortably close to it. (I would almost rather field explaining Proposition 8 to a 7-year-old, which Katrina had to do last week). There are no easy or genuinely soothing answers, nothing to ward off the sense of hurt and loss that children of adoption feel. We are not magically endowed, as parents or people who have gone through the adoption process, with the ability to answer such questions wisely. All we can offer is honesty, compassion both to the child and her birth parents, and a sense that such questions are not off limits. We can also assure our children — falsely — that their inquiries do not wound us.

It’s nice to be able to tell them as a matter of record, rather than as a matter of fond hope, that America will not limit what they can achieve based on the color of their skin.

I tried to explain this to Evan this morning. It’s challenging to talk about social and racial watersheds to a seven-year-old playing “Deck the Halls” off-key on the piano in his underwear. I told him that Obama had won, and tried to make him understand why it was such a big deal: that for many years in this country, many people believed that you could, and should, judge others based on the color of their skin, that millions of people found their prospects severely limited based on what they looked like, and that the election of a man who looked like Obama showed how far we had come from that. He seemed incredulous at the notion that skin color determined how you should treat people, which is a good sign.

I carefully did not tell him that anyone can become president. They can’t. Evan was born in South Korea, arrived home in the United States before he was five months old, and under federal law automatically became a citizen of the United States upon our adoption of him before he was one. Abby and Elaina both came home and became citizens before turning one. Under Section II, Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, they are ineligible to become president:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

Though there is some wiggle room in what “natural born Citizen” means, it’s pretty clear that it can’t be extended to someone born in a foreign country to foreign birth parents and thereafter made U.S. citizens.

I can’t really articulate to my kids why they shouldn’t be able to become president. That’s why I’d support a constitutional amendment making foreign-born citizens eligible. That proposed amendment got more attention back when Gov. Schwarzenegger was reasonably popular, but there’s no talk of it now. Regrettably, absent a specific popular political figure who triggers the issue, I doubt such an amendment will rise to sufficient prominence to be taken seriously.

The amendment I would propose is as follows:

Only a person who has been a United States citizen for thirty-five years, and a resident of the United States for fourteen years, shall be eligible to the Office of President.

Under this amendment, natural-born citizens and people like my kids would be on the same footing — they wouldn’t be eligible to be president until they had been a citizen for thirty-five years (natural born citizens facing that barrier as a result of the age requirement. Someone who became a citizen at age 20 couldn’t be president until reaching 55, and et cetera.

I’m sure that opponents would warn of “sleeper agents” and complain that people born elsewhere might not be loyal to America in the way that people born here are. Can’t the electorate sort out those concerns when voting for president, though?

That’s hardly surprising in and of itself. There are plenty of people who have strong feelings about what some folks still call “race-mixing.” Their views have fallen out of fashion, so they’re mostly confined to writing poorly spelled screeds on web sites and marching in the occasional white-sheeted parade.

What makes Mike’s views notable is that he’s a columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and it publishes his tripe.

See, Mike has concluded that international adoption is just about making a fashion statement, and that there is no reason to adopt some Asian kid. Mike has concluded that knows everything there is to know about adoption from watching a couple of movies.

As you may have realized by this point, Mike is a willfully ignorant ass.

Let’s discuss just a few of the reasons Mike is an ass.

1. The “Latest Trend”: What-I-See-Must-Be-A-Trend Journalism

There’s a shallow and lazy school of journalism that I refer to as “trendoid.” You see it regrettably often in the pages of everything from the New York Times to entertainment rags. It’s essence is narcissism: the journalist, having noticed that some friends and acquaintances are doing a particular activity, or having noticed that activity portrayed on TV or in movies, concludes that there is a new major trend of doing that activity. The journalist savors his position at the center of the universe; what he perceives must be universal. Factual research into whether this activity is actually prevalent — or into whether the activity has actually been going on for years and the journalist has just been to wrapped up in herself to notice it — is not required, and would in fact detract from the breathless “OMG a trend!” tone of the piece.

(This is related to, but distinct from, the New York Times tradition of running pieces delivered in a Marlin-Perkins-hosting-Wild-Kingdom tone of safari-going fascination that some people are conservative. In New York! But I digress.)

Anyway, Seate’s column is a prime example of this stew of self-centered and lazy ignorance. Seate concludes that adoption of Asian kids is the “latest fad” based on watching two movies. No, really.

In “Then She Found Me,” Helen Hunt portrays a neurotic mess of a woman who screws up every relationship in her life and can’t tell good men from rotten ones. Unable to conceive a child naturally, Hunt’s character decides to reward herself with something guaranteed to make her character and the audience smile: a Chinese baby girl.
. . . .
One week later, I suffered through an afternoon screening of the glitzy handbag commercial cleverly disguised as a major motion picture known as “Sex and the City.” In that one, Charlotte, one member of the quartet of ditzy, clothes-obsessed main characters, couldn’t conceive a child naturally.

The solution? She adopts one of those adorable Chinese babies you’ve heard so much about — forcing viewers to spend much of the next 90 minutes of film watching these four screwed-up women as they screw up some kid who would be better off in a rice paddy 7,000 miles from any of them.

(The “rice paddy” line is a dead giveaway for Seate’s views on Asians, by the way. Imagine, for a moment, if I wrote a column saying that white folks should not adopt African-American kids because “they’d be better off shooting hoops in some project.”)

Naturally, Seate’s got no data to back up his point that adopting Asian kids is the “latest fad.” If he had been a journalist, rather than a piss-poor spleen-venter, he might have done some homework and realized that he’s full of shit. International adoption by Americans has been trending up in the long term. But that’s the long term — over 16 years. It’s hard to make a credible argument that something that has been growing steadily since before Clinton was in office is either “the latest” or a “fad.” Moreover, in the last couple of years the trend has been going the other direction. In 2006 and 2007 — the years that a reasonable person might look at to determine if something is, indeed, the latest fad — international adoptions in the U.S. dropped by a significant amount. Once again, it’s had to argue that something is the “latest fad” if it had been going up steadily until the last two years and then began trending down.

No, what Mike Seate means is that it’s the latest thing that’s risen to his notice. But what does or does not rise to Mike Seate’s notice is hardly a matter of public interest.

2. The “Fashionable” Slur: If I Can’t Imagine Adopting An Asian Kid, You Must Be Doing It For Bad Reasons

Next up in the Mike Seate prejudiced idiocy hit parade, the increasingly popular “it’s fashionable!” slur. Most international adoptive parents have heard this one at one point or another, either with a reference just that blunt or with a giggly comment about Brad and Angelina. Seate goes in full bore in the column:

Call me cynical, but since when did Asian children become “must have” fashion accessories for upper middle-class Americans?

Along with Calloway golf clubs and season tickets to football games, paying $30,000 to $40,000 to adopt an exotic baby is suddenly viewed as the most chic purchase this side of a pair of Manolo Blahnik pumps.

If Mike Seate interviewed a single person who adopted internationally before writing that, I’ll cut off my right nut with a spork. For people like Mike Seate, it’s enough that they can’t imagine adopting a foreign kid in general or an Asian kid in particular. They can’t imagine embracing a radically different culture and loving a child who doesn’t look like them. So they assume that only a person with base motives could possibly want to adopt a child from Asia. That’s how someone like Mike Seate can call tens of thousands of Americans shallow and fashion-obsessed without meeting even one of them. Mike Seate doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know how my family reached the decision to adopt first from Korea and then from China. But Mike Seate wouldn’t care. Once again, it’s pure narcissism: If I don’t know about it, and I can’t grasp it, it can’t be important.

Note that Seate is not content to classify parents he’s never met or talked to. He classifies the babies as well:

That’s a shame. Because if people really wanted to adopt children because of a desire to become parents, they’d just adopt babies, not fashion statements.

You see, Asian babies aren’t real babies. At least not to Seate.

3. There Can’t Be Any Reason, Because I Don’t Know Any Reason

To a pretend “journalist” like Mike Seate, a fact doesn’t exist unless he already knows it or unless he can learn it by watching whatever is on TV that day. In this case, Mike’s abject ignorance is focused on American adoption. Mike isn’t familiar with the reasons that people might adopt internationally, so they don’t exist:

There is no, and let me repeat, no reason that any American family should be looking outside our own borders for kids to adopt when tens of thousands of American kids languish in foster care. Unless, of course, these families are only interested in Asian kids because A) it’s what everybody else says to do, and B) they expect a quiet, studious child who will be a math whiz and excels at the cello.

(First, note again how gleefully Mike Seate trades in racism with his eager use of the cello-and-math stereotype. Sooner or later one must ask: does Mike Seate really care deeply about African-American kids in the U.S., or does he just have an issue with Asians?)

Once again, Mike doesn’t bother to inquire or research. Some people reacting to his column have tried to educate him (and far more politely than he deserves, but he responds with contempt, calling their explanations “dubious” and characterizing their responses as “weeping and wailing.” He blusters that people have to pay “tens of thousands in bribes to be paid to Chinese officials” (there’s Mike’s attitudes towards Asians again) without any support. No support will be forthcoming — I didn’t pay any bribes in China, let alone “tens of thousands.” Mike’s talking out of his ass — or, more appropriately, out of his spleen.

Had Mike educated himself — had he interviewed even one set of adoptive parents — and had he been capable of considering the answers fairly, here are some of the reasons for adopting internationally that he might have heard about:

• Cultural Affinity: We know many families in which one or both parent is Asian. We even know some in which one of the parents was an Asian adoptee himself or herself. International adoption is a way for these families to connect with their birth cultures. Many such parents have the joy of passing along cultural elements like language, history, literature, food, and celebrations to their children, ensuring that they learn about their birth culture. Indeed, many white parents feel a deep connection to Asian culture. But somehow, I don’t think Mike Seate was thinking about Asian parents.
• Youth: At least in some states and counties, you can’t count on adopting an infant unless you go through the expensive and completely unpredictable domestic private adoption route. There’s no telling whether or not you’ll be matched with an infant through domestic public adoption. Many parents want to adopt an infant. They want to influence the child’s earliest development, which can be crucial for healthy attachment. They want to experience parenthood as completely as possible. People like Mike Seate tend to begrudge them this; such people think that adoptive parents should just be happy with whatever they can get.
• Timing and Certainty: Right now adoption from many Asian countries is very slow. But there have been times when international adoption was the most prompt option. Our son came home within a year of our initial application. By contrast, domestic adoption (whether private or public) can be quick or can be slow — it’s unpredictable. Similarly, for qualified couples, international adoption is as close to a sure thing as you can get — there may be bumps in the road, but if you meet the criteria, it’s going to happen. By contrast, there are simply no guarantees in domestic adoption.
• Change of Mind and Heartbreak: In international adoption, parental rights have been terminated before the baby is placed with the adoptive parents. (There are legitimate concerns about how this is done in some countries, and debates about the ethics of the process, but that does not appear to be Seate’s concern). Once you get the baby, the baby isn’t (save in the most extreme cases involving unreliable agencies) going to be taken back. There’s no such guarantee for domestic adoption in the American legal system. In private adoptions, mothers routinely change their mind after giving birth — it’s happened to two different couples I know. In public adoptions, some states allow late-coming changes of mind by parents, and previously unidentified fathers can come out of the woodwork claiming rights. It’s a risk, and one that many parents are simply not willing to take — particularly when parents have arrived at adoption through the hellishly uncertain and disappointing process of fertility treatment.
• Hostility Towards Some Transracial Adoption: Mike Seate’s column demonstrates the cultural catch-22 that white adoptive parents face: if you don’t adopt an African-American baby, people like Mike Seate will call you a shallow racist, and if you do, other people will accuse you of cultural genocide. Until relatively recently the National Association of Black Social Workers took the official position that white adoption of African-American children was cultural genocide and decried it in the harshest terms possible. This issue was much in the news just last month (although not, apparently, enough to penetrate Mike Seale’s consciousness) when various social worker groups renewed calls for race-consciousness in adoption placement in the wake of a study claiming that black children suffer because adoption agencies can’t force whites to take classes on how to raise them properly. The issue was also the source of much controversy in the 1990s, when Congress passed laws requiring race-neutrality in adoption placements over the vigorous dissent of many social worker groups (again, a debate and issue of national prominence that apparently when unnoticed by “journalist” Mike Seate. ) I know that I could love any child regardless of the color of that child’s skin. But like many other adoptive parents, I find the decades-old consistent hostility towards transracial adoption expressed by prominent social worker groups to be chilling. Those are the people who will be evaluating my suitability as a parent, evaluating how a child is doing in my custody, recommending whether or not I should be allowed to adopt the child. It’s a major deterrent to white adoption of African-American children. Now, Mike Seate isn’t responsible for all of that simply because he is African-American. But he’s responsible for being ignorant of it when he shoots off his mouth about white adoption of African-American kids.
• Cultural Resources: Though I disagree with the groups that say that whites shouldn’t adopt African-Americans as bright-line rule, I agree with them on one point: adoptive parents have a moral obligation not to ignore their kids’ ethnicity, and an obligation to expose them to their birth culture and to equip them with resources for dealing with how America will treat them based on the color of their skin. Many parents, like me, feel better equipped to do this for Asian kids than for African-American kids. I live in a neighborhood with a very sizable Asian community; at my son’s school, nearly 40% of the class is Korean like him. There are two Korean groceries in walking distance, places to take Korean language lessons, and Korean churches. There’s a wealth of Chinese resources for my youngest daughter. And because of the places we grew up, the schools we went to, and the places we work, we have more Asian friends (potential role models and confidants for the kids) than African-American ones. It would be far more difficult for me to raise an African-American child responsibly — that is, not to simply pretend the kid was white. i simply don’t have the same resources.

These are just a few of the reasons, and just off of the top of my head. Other adoptive parents could name many others. But Mike Seate doesn’t care.

4. Only American Kids Have Genuine Need

Seate’s angry because there are kids in the American foster care system who need homes:

Never mind that thousands of babies of other races — most of them black — go without foster homes and adoptions here and elsewhere in this country every year. It doesn’t cost tens of thousands of dollars to adopt a black, Latino or mixed-race child.

Seate’s right, there are kids in need here. But Seate is proceeding from a hidden yet familiar premise: only American kids are needy in a way we should care about. This is a variation on a nationalistic theme we heard after the terrible Asian tsunami a few years back; many expressed anger that people and governments were sending money to foreigners instead of using it here.

People are people. The world is a better place when a child has a home, no matter what that child’s skin color or where she was born. Asian kids aren’t somehow racially better suited to orphanages than African-Americans. They’re humans. They have feelings like anyone else. The view of Seate and his ilk that some kids should be first in line as a matter of right because they’re American is obnoxious. “America first” is an ethos — but it’s not the only one.

By the way, there’s something else utterly banal and typical about Seate’s views on adoptive parents duty:

I have no children of my own, but . . . .

Yep. Seate feels free to mouth off about how badly African-American kids need parents, and to lecture adoptive parents about their moral obligations to choose kids of the correct skin color. But he doesn’t walk the walk. Seate seems to have a steady job as a columnist, at least until the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review realizes what an ignorant racist dick he is (assuming they would care). He could adopt one of these needy kids. But does he? No. Like so many who criticize others for not adopting from the foster care system, he’s all about talk. No doubt he thinks that pontificating on the issue is his contribution.

Increasingly I have very low expectations for the media. By being so transparently racist and willfully ignorant, Mike Seate manages to fall short of even those. Mike Seate, you fail at journalism and at life.

Edited to add:

Seate is following a pattern typical of columnists who like to write racist crap: (1) write something offensive, (2) wait for responses — some angry, some profane, some reasonable — to flood in, (3) cherry-pick the most profane or ignorant or racist responses, and (4) selectively quote those responses to represent the whole, and don the martyr’s garb. “Oh, poor me — how unfairly these people are treating me!” Seate’s doing that right now. He’s big on accusing adoptive parents of racism — based on selective quotation of a few of many responses his bigoted column drew — but because he’s a coward, he’ll never address his own racism, embodied in his fondness for quips like the rice paddy reference. What a loser.

Via.

Second edit: Welcome to the over a thousand people who have visited to read this post. If you are interested in adoption issues, check out our coverage of the subject. We’ve also got an adoption discussion forum dedicated to discussion of serious adoption issues — if you’d like to join, register for the forums and send Ken a PM or email.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: My husband and I have two daughters, ages 3 and 6, that we adopted from China when they were babies. Many times when we are in public, absolute strangers will come up to our family and ask within our children’s hearing if they are “real” sisters.

If I say, “yes,” they continue to press me about if they are biologically related. As far as we know, our daughters are not biologically related. However, we don’t feel that we owe strangers explanations about our personal family business.

Could you please offer some suggestions on how to answer this “invasive” question? We want to set a good example for our children, and we don’t want to be rude, but it is getting tiresome.

GENTLE READER: Since you know from the wording of the first question that the second one is coming, Miss Manners advises nipping this conversation early. She suggests saying gently, “Yes, they are sisters, and I am their mother. But I have been teaching them not to talk to strangers, so I’m afraid that you will have to excuse me, please.”

On some level this warms my heart, because Miss Manners is advocating something that sounds very much like the cut direct, which is precisely what such insufferable inquisitiveness merits. I would have expected her to advocate something far more genteel. Perhaps she knows that such people are very rarely deterred from their nosiness by a polite deflection; they persist in saying things like “no, I mean are they really sisters,” or “you, YOU KNOW what I mean” as if they are entitled to know. The response “oi, fuckstain, what’s it to you” is effective and adequate to the occasion when the children are not within earshot or able to comprehend. But Miss Manners, I believe, does not advocate use of the term “fuckstain,” with the possible exception of improper salad fork placement.

After they left, she opened the bill holder to get the tip and also found a card inside that read:

We wish to adopt a baby. We are a caring, happily married, financially secure and loving couple. We want to share our joy and love with a child.

The card included the names of the couple and phone numbers.

The waitress, not surprisingly, was creeped out and offended.

Who is behind this? Wow, what a shock — an adoption attorney.

As far as the card is concerned, he said, “We haven’t had any negative response to this method.”