ever-fixed mark

Last week I decided to apply for Minor’s Social Security card so that we would have his number in time for tax season. This promised to be a nervewracking process, because the intersection of “adoption” and “federal government” is always a potential trainwreck. Each federal employee has his own special understanding of which documents are required to formalize an international adoptee’s status in this country, and I have never met a clerk who is familiar with the newish law that says that adopted children are automatically U.S. citizens as soon as their adoptions are final in the U.S. I am always being asked for the kids’ “proof of citizenship” or “naturalization papers,” which don’t exist.

So I drove twenty miles to the nearest Social Security office. The waiting room was tiny, and almost empty, but a security guard directed me to take a number. I took a number and sat down and realized that I had left Minor’s birth certificate, a required document, on the kitchen table.

I drove twenty miles back to Port City, which is not easy when you are banging your head back to the steering wheel, and got the birth certificate.

Twenty miles later (sixty total, if you’re keeping track at home) I was back in the now-empty waiting room. I took a number. The clerk took my application and we began negotiations about what does or does not constitute “proof of citizenship.” With that hurdle cleared, he asked for my social security number, and then entered it into the computer.

“This is the wrong number,” he said.

I recited it again.

“This is not your number,” he said.

I had the number written in at least ten places in my paperwork the exact same way. I asked him to check again. “Maybe you have it under my maiden name?”

“No, this number belongs to a man who was born in 1934,” he said. “Do you have your Social Security card?”

I didn’t, simply because no one ever asks you to produce your card, and I’ve had the number memorized for years. I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. I was certain that it was the correct number. How was I going to prove to the federal government that I existed? It was like that scene in so many thrillers where the hero tries to use a credit card or ID and finds out that the government has erased his identity. Was I going to have to go on the lam?

I pretended to search for my card to stall for time, all the while wondering what the HELL was going on. “Can’t you search for me by name?” I asked.

He did, and said, “Oh, there you are.”

“What do you mean, ‘there you are’?”

“I’ve got it here. And there’s your number. The other record was just showing me something different. Don’t worry about it.”

The Social Security database shows some strange man’s information attached to my number. Memo to the federal government: I AM OFFICIALLY WORRIED ABOUT IT.

I found myself wondering whether there is a special dispensation for someone who does bodily harm to a Social Security clerk in such a situation. Surely our justice system would be lenient in such a case — it would be viewed as the legal equivalent of a venial sin.

Luckily, though, before I could decide on a course of action, I saw the large placard in the window advising me that, pursuant to 28 CFR Part 64.2, it is a federal crime to kill, kidnap, assault, threaten, intimidate, or interfere with a federal officer in the course of his or her duties.

Hmmm. What if I just stuck my tongue out at him and said, “Nah nah nah nah, you were wrong”?

Let me just consult my handy-dandy Electronic Code of Federal Regulations.

Nope, nope, it says it is also a crime to “retaliate” against said officers.

Nothing about blogging, though.

The New York Times ran a feature in the magazine section this weekend about adoptive parents searching for their children’s birth mothers. I read it with apprehension, the way I do articles about clinical research or the few other topics I know first-hand that are routinely butchered by the media: How will they get it wrong THIS time?

The author is an adoptive parent herself, of a child from Guatemala, so the article was factual enough, although a little too constrained by her own experience. The thesis seemed to be, “Be careful what you search for, because you might find it!” with attendant horror stories about birth parents who asked the adoptive parents for money or had unsavory personal histories. I’m not sure how necessary that cautionary note was. Very few people emerge from the adoptive process imagining their kid’s birth parents were a king and queen who had to leave their child by a riverbank due to a spell cast by an evil fairy. Yet here was this author, telling people that they might be better off not knowing.

Ridiculous, I thought. It’s always better for a child to know his history than not to know it. That’s one of the basic tenets of modern adoption. Right?

Then I remembered an exchange we had with our social worker.

It was during our first homestudy, the one that resulted in Aitch. The caseworker was asking us if we would consider an open adoption; of course we would. She asked what we would tell our child about his background, and we made appropriate noises about talking about adoption from early childhood on and the revealing the details at the right time, as the child aged.

She persisted. “What if you found out your child was conceived as a result of a rape?”

I had considered it before. I really hoped that we wouldn’t be faced with such a difficult situation, but I was aware of the fact that the child could have been conceived as a result of rape or incest. Husband and I had never discussed it, though.

“Would there be any point in revealing that?” I asked.

Husband said, “At least not until he or she is an adult. If at all.”

The social worker let us know that this was the wrong answer. “You have to be honest with your child above all. What if he found out later? He would know you were lying.”

I said, “If you waited until he was old enough to understand, wouldn’t that be like finding out you had lied? Wouldn’t he be angry then?”

The social worker said that we would have to dole out the details gradually, starting when the child was very young, and I tried to wrap my head around how you would discuss a child’s rape origins in an age-appropriate way with a five-year-old, a seven-year-old, a ten-year-old. Even thirty seems too young to hear that story. We wanted to pass the home study, though, so I told the social worker I could see her point and would think about it. In fact, I did see her point, but I saw my point, too.

Luckily, we did not have to face that situation.

It bothers me, though, that people persist in thinking there is one “right” way to do adoption, and that social workers perpetuate that myth: if you are completely open about the child’s history/put early intervention on speed dial for attachment issues/dress the kid in a hanbok for his first birthday/eat Korean food a few times a year/attend Korean culture class, you’re doing it right (the subtext being that you don’t have to worry about anything else). There’s nothing wrong with any of those actions, of course, but it’s not a formula. In most situations, there could be multiple valid choices, depending on how they are handled. That includes revealing a background of rape or incest.

There’s a pretty good article here that weighs both options without being terribly judgmental. Too bad my social worker could not have taken the same approach.

The mystery of Minor’s birth place was really bugging me, so I made a few calls to the adoption agency and spoke with the Korea program director, who was extremely helpful.

I asked her to confirm the source of the information on the adoption decree, and she said it comes from the birth place named on the Korean legal documents. Our agency does not provide these to the parents, although other agencies do. She said that these documents routinely list the child’s birth place as Seoul, even if the Korean agency knows the child was born elsewhere. (We didn’t notice this with Aitch, because he actually was born in Seoul.) This is a holdover from the bad old days when placement for adoption was seen as shameful, and the child’s existence officially began the day he was turned over to the adoption agency in Korea. Apparently, many older adoptees who are just starting to dive into their personal history are surprised to learn they weren’t born in Seoul, like it says on their birth certificates.

I am not the first parent to notice this discrepancy, but she does not know of any parents who have been successful in changing the birth certificate. That would require getting revised legal documents from the Korean government, which they will not provide.

Regarding the conflict on the referral papers, she offered to confirm that Minor was born in SouthernCity, not OtherSouthernCity, which was terribly nice of her. She thought the mention of OtherSouthernCity might have been a translation error.

I’m happy to know that Minor’s record isn’t damaged forever because of some mistake I made, but I’m sorry that both the boys have inaccurate birth certificates. I may have not stated this clearly in the last post, but their birth certificates, issued by Port City, do not identify us as the boys’ adopted parents. They identify us as simply the father and mother, which is good and correct and all that, but…it is the BIRTH record, not the parenthood record. We weren’t in the picture at the time of their births; listing us as parents without acknowledgment of their other parents is withholding a big part of the story.

I thought that their birth certificates would look something like the one my parents kept in their bottom drawer when I was a child: not just the parents and the date but also the time, place, and hospital of birth, along with an adorable baby footprint. Since birth parents are generally not identified for Korean adoptions, I thought their names might be somehow redacted or anonymized. I didn’t know that birth certificates were re-generated for adopted children with the names of their adoptive parents, and I never anticipated this half-fictionalized birth certificate.

I keep thinking of that scene in Robert Cormier’s young adult book I Am the Cheese where Adam discovers his two birth certificates and figures out that his parents have changed their identities to enter the Witness Protection Program. I picture Minor finding it in a drawer and saying, wait, is this me? I thought they told me I was born in SouthernCity, not Seoul! And then the Mafia will kill Husband and me and put Minor in a mental hospital.

Sorry if I spoiled it for you, but really, you should have read it when you were 13.

Earlier this week, we went to the City Clerk’s office to procure Minor’s birth certificate. The former city clerk is now the Mayor, and the new city clerk (who has three adopted children) has two administrators working for him. All were extremely nice, making it a big change from our last experience, and when they handed me Minor’s birth certificate I was pleased to see that all the apostrophes had been added in the right places.

The fee for a birth certificate is $10, but the admin gave me a replacement for Aitch’s offending document on the house, because, as she said, “You’re the one responsible for getting it changed!” I never mentioned it, so I assume that Port City has that marked in my permanent record, along with “Complains frequently about city merchants failing to shovel sidewalks.”

One odd thing: Husband, looking over Minor’s birth certificate to make sure everything was spelled correctly, noted, “The birth place is wrong. Wasn’t he born in SouthernCity, Korea?”

The clerk showed us that the birth place on the certificate, Seoul, was indeed the city listed on the adoption decree. So the question was, what is the source of the information on the adoption decree?

I assumed this was just a simple mistake on someone’s part, probably mine, as I had signed off on the information at the courthouse. (But let the record show that I signed it in the hall, with Minor clinging to me; I’m lucky I didn’t approve a completely different name.) When I got back home, though, I checked all of Minor’s paperwork. The only document that lists his birth city is the referral, and…get this…it lists two different places, both SouthernCity and OtherSouthernCity.

Oh. So this must be why, whenever someone asks me where Minor is born, I say, “It’s either SouthernCity or OtherSouthernCity, I can never remember.” I can’t believe I never realized that both cities were listed.

More importantly, there is no other official record of his birthplace anywhere in my paperwork. There is a hospital chart from a hospital in SouthernCity for his admission to be treated for jaundice three days after his birth. I assume he would have been taken to the same hospital, or at least a hospital in the same city, so I’m fairly confident he was born in SouthernCity, and not OtherSouthernCity fifty miles away. It would be good to confirm this officially, for Minor’s sake. It’s too weird that his Port City birth certificate not only implies that I gave birth to him, but also says that it occurred in a city he did not arrive at until he was a month old.

I feel like I owe it to the boys to give them as much information about their birth families and their heritage as I can, and yet I can’t even answer Question #1 for Minor, “Where was I born?” With adoption this information is sometimes unavoidably obscured, but damn it, I should not be the one obscuring it.

Our court appointment to finalize Minor’s adoption was scheduled for last Tuesday morning. I have often marveled at the photos posted on the Holt bulletin board marking finalization celebrations: siblings decked out in matching red, white and blue outfits, and relatives numbering in the double digits posing with the judge while holding American flags. Ours was a bit more prosaic. As I may have mentioned before, Husband and I are not overly sentimental people; or, rather, we can be sentimental about our own children, but not on command. So during the classic adoption moments that are supposed to unfold like a Hallmark card, all soft focus and sweet words, we tend to seize up.

On Tuesday this meant spending most of the morning grumbling about the impossibility of getting four humans up, fed, bathed, dressed, and out before 7:30 a.m., especially when one of the four still poops explosively and had to be given his second bath in twelve hours. Really, it should be an Olympic event: the quintathlon! Unlike the biathlon, no guns are allowed, no matter how they might ease the transitions.

The courthouse is about an hour away, given traffic. We passed through the metal detectors and up to the second floor lobby, where the docket was posted. I did not see our names, just one divorce case after another. Our attorney found us quickly, though, and handed me the adoption decree. With Minor clinging to my leg, I stood in the middle of the foyer, held the paper as steady as I could, and signed…something. I hope it was the paper to keep him, and not the one to give him away. Then I went chasing after Minor while Husband signed the same paper.

They ushered us into the judge’s chambers. While I was struggling with Minor, my purse, the baby backpack, and my camera, he recited a few words — I heard Minor’s Korean name, pronounced oddly, and his new name — and then it was over. The judge asked if he could hold the guest of honor. Minor does not always go to strangers willingly, but he melted into the judge’s arms and snuggled right into his shoulder.

Is it just me, or does the judge look a little startled by Minor’s enthusiastic response?

As we left, Husband apologized for the drool stain on the judge’s robe. He was nice about it and, probably thinking ahead to all the divorce cases, said it was still the best part of his day.

We had our last post-placement appointment for Minor on Friday; our last social worker sighting ever, unless we develop temporary amnesia about The Wonder Years and decide to adopt another baby. The universe marked this occasion with a thunderstorm. In New England. In December.

We’ve had three placement visits with the social worker over the past 6 months. Minor has been 4 months, 7 months, and 10 months old at these visits. At each visit, she’s asked the following questions:

Does he crawl? Not to speak of, no.

Does he say Mama or Dada? Well, he can SAY them, but not with any specificity.

What does he call you? Pretty much just AHHHHH!

What does he call Aitch? Same thing.

Is he pulling himself up to standing yet? Nope, not yet.

Is he “cruising”? Just chicks. Not furniture.

Have you thought about calling Early Intervention?

You may recall that lo these many months ago, when we were starting the paperwork for Minor’s adoption, I had Early Intervention evaluate Aitch at this social worker’s insistence, and he didn’t qualify for any services. Since Minor has seemed, despite his deficiencies, to be more advanced than Aitch on most milestones, and certainly not behind on anything except crawling, it has not occurred to me to call the Early Intervention people for Minor. At least, it would not have occurred to me had she not suggested it three times in the past six months.

I feel the same kind of frustration that I did a few weeks ago when the pediatric nurse practitioner called to tell me, “All your daughter’s test results came back normal,” or when that same nurse asked me if I ate peanut butter when I was pregnant with Aitch. In other words, “You’re part of the infrastructure that’s supposed to be serving as a safety net for my child, and you can’t get even the most basic details right?  You can’t remember that my child is a boy, is adopted, is not yet beyond the normal age range for speaking his first word or walking? Even if you can’t remember, you couldn’t be bothered to read his file before you saw us?  If you can’t even keep the basic facts straight, what good would you be if I really needed help?”

But Minor is not ours yet, so when she suggested Early Intervention I just said, “Sure, I’m familiar with Early Intervention.  If he starts lagging behind I’ll definitely call them.”

And then she signed the papers, so with any luck, one day soon, we will officially be Minor’s family.

I wrote this on the train on Thursday, but didn’t get to post it then. It’s Part I of the delivery story.

I spent most of the early afternoon Tuesday making travel arrangements.

First, my mother was due to arrive at the airport at 6:00, and I had to find some way to get her to our house. Normally I would just drive down and get her, but the floods had shut down one of the major routes, forcing all the traffic onto the highways—five hours round-trip. The guy who usually drives me for business trips agreed to do it, but then she was delayed, then rescheduled, then rescheduled again, so I had to spend a lot of time on the phone.

I was also scheduled to go to New York at the end of the week, so I had to figure out the train and find a hotel. The whole city was sold out (due, apparently, to the Stationery Convention—that’s going to be a wild time). That gave me a good excuse to book something much pricier than usual, at a cost that didn’t seem to faze my clients at all. I also booked a ticket for the New York City ballet on Thursday night. It’s one of the few perks of business travel; since you’re out anyway, you might as well do some fun grown-up stuff.

Since my mother was going to be there for the weekend, and some friends were getting together in Boston on Saturday, I impulsively decided to book a hotel room for Husband and me downtown. I had enough points in the Marriott account I didn’t even know was there to get yet another overpriced room.

Then the phone rang. I glanced at caller ID, wondering which one of my to-do list tasks was finally returning my call. The bank, about the loan to refinish the attic? The contractor, finally giving us a start date? The furniture people, who were three weeks late delivering the dressers for the nursery?

It was our social worker. I knew it was the call. They don’t call people during the referral-to-travel interval unless it’s good news, because it’s too crushing otherwise. “I have good news!” she chirped. “Your son is coming home on Friday. I don’t know the flight details yet, but I’ll get in touch with you as soon as I do.”

I spent most of the late afternoon Tuesday changing travel arrangements.

I moved the New York trip up a day, so I’d be back in time to get to the airport. (Ladies who do it the old-fashioned way: when you tell someone you’re being induced on Friday, do they say, “Great! Well, if you hurry you can make it to New York and back before the birth”?) I rescheduled the train ticket, and thought about canceling the second night in the New York hotel, but I must have lost momentum there, as I found out later. I called the Boston friends to cancel dinner; I canceled the Boston hotel and, miraculously, got my points back. I spent a few minutes on the New York City Ballet web site trying to figure out how I might change the ticket.

Then, I stopped and took a few ujjayi breaths and tried to achieve some measure of inner calm. It was then and only then I could hear my subconscious screaming OH MY GOD WE’RE HAVING ANOTHER BABY.

Like, oh my God! Another baby!

Sometimes my subconscious sounds like a Valley Girl, circa 1982.

So. Here I am in New York, while Husband and Aitch and my mother are at home, getting ready for the baby. It’s actually been a great trip, even though I overslept and had only an hour and ten minutes to shower, pack, and drive 60 miles to the train station. After that, though, everything went smoothly. The hotel graciously allowed me to cancel the extra night after I told them I was suddenly having a baby; this explanation also worked on the New York City Ballet, who not only exchanged my ticket but gave me a very good seat for Wednesday night. (Excitement is contagious. The next time I want some customer service person someone to help me out, instead of giving them a sob story I’m going to tell them that something wonderful—an Oscar nomination, a MacArthur grant, a lottery win—is the reason I need to exchange merchandise without a receipt/upgrade to first class without enough points/get a lower interest rate on my credit card.)

It has been very stimulating, rushing from midtown to the Village to Lincoln Center in a taxi, watching all the people rush around me, and thinking, this is not the most exciting thing I’ll be doing this week.

After this week’s monsoon, Port City has exploded in a riot of green. I’ve changed my blog theme to go green as well. The picture in the banner shows Aitch during his Tol party, a Korean tradition on a baby’s first birthday that is often celebrated by adoptive parents in the US. (The 100-day party is a bigger celebration in Korea, but most adoptive parents are not able to be with their children at the 100-day mark.)

During the Tol party, the baby is dressed in a colorful hanbok, and he is guided through a ceremony in which he chooses one of several symbolic objects set out on a table: dates, a sword, money, a spool of thread, and a ruler, among others. The objects he chooses are supposed to indicate his destiny.

Social workers are big on encouraging adoptive parents to celebrate their child’s culture. This is one of the post-placement visit questions: “Let’s see,” riffling through papers, “I’m supposed to ask, what have you been doing this month to integrate Korean culture into you baby’s life?” she said, seemingly unaware that it was a ridiculous goal for a six-month-old. “Uh, nothing?” I answered the first time, as the child’s life was pretty much a non-cultured round of drinking, sleeping, and elimination. The third time I was asked the question, though, I thought I’d better come up with a better answer, so I piped up: “We’re planning a Tol party for his first birthday!” Thus, the photo.

This Caucasian appropriation of Asian customs comes in for quite a bit of derision in some circles, as you can imagine. Earlier this year, right after Lunar New Year, I was horrified to read a message board on which a Chinese man expressed his disgust at seeing white parents and their Chinese daughters at a Chinese restaurant celebrating the holiday. His point was that white people should not adopt Asian children; other people, though, have expressed the point more subtly, criticizing adoptive parents for going in for surface symbols — ethnic costumes, food, and holidays — while ignoring their children’s racial identities.

As with so many parenting decisions, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Of course, I think it’s important to deal with my children’s racial and cultural identities, but I’m not sure that it always means a big showy display. On the other hand, it’s not going to hurt them to celebrate Tol or Lunar New Year, even inauthentically. I certainly don’t accept that it’s wrong for people to adopt transracially; it seems to imply that culture must be handed down pure from one generation to the next. Take that one step further and you’ve concluded that it’s wrong to create mixed-race or mixed-ethnicity children, and that’s just rot.

I mean, think about it. What’s your culture?

I was born in the US.

I grew up in an area that was largely settled by people with German ancestry.

Ethnically, I’m Italian and Greek.

Ethnically, my husband is Irish, my sons Korean, and my dog Austro-Hungarian.

My first name is French, my middle name Italian, my last name Irish.

I have lived in the US, Germany, Italy, and Tunisia.

I speak English, German, French, Tunisian Arabic, and some Italian.

I don’t speak any Greek, know few Greek people, can’t cook any Greek food, and don’t know where my Greek ancestors came from or even the correct spelling of their last name.

I read chiefly English literature.

I cook Italian, American, and Tunisian food.

I’ve always felt tremendously connected to Japanese and Indian culture, although I’ve never traveled to either country.

I was raised Catholic, but the religion for which I feel the most affinity is Judaism.

So, I realize that multiculturalism is dead (subscription required), or at least David Brooks is trying to make waves by saying it is, but for many people “multi-culti” is organic. It just happens.

What’s your culture?

Last week, we received yet another hand-addressed envelope from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. This was the I600 approval, dated a scant 3 weeks after our referral and a scantier 2 weeks after submission. I compared this to the paperwork we received for Aitch (I know, don’t compare children! It’s so unfair! And I’m starting already!), and last time it took the government 6 weeks from referral to approval. That’s a fifty percent reduction in approval time from Baby 1 to Baby 2! (Sorry, this week at work we’re doing metrics.)

Anyway, at the bottom of the approval form we found this:

Do you recognize that row of little icons in the bottom right-hand corner? They’re “Wingdings,” that font that generates symbols from keystrokes. Go ahead, open Word, select “Wingdings” as your font, and try it. Exact same symbols, right?

The question is, why is the government using cheesy Wingdings on an official form?

Husband has a theory that the wingdings are a pictographic representation of what you go through in the adoption process. To wit: “You apply to the adoption agency (envelope), then you do the homestudy and they give you the OK to proceed (hand), then you choose a country (flag), then you pay the agency fee (blood drop), then you fill out Package A and Package B and the country-specific package and the I600 (manila envelopes)….” Feel free to finish the rest of the story in your heads.

My theory is that the wingdings are a secret code. Since our government’s track record at keeping secrets is not so stellar, it would probably be a simple cipher–say, a basic substitution of letters for their corresponding symbols.

*N(S0000157229*

Any thoughts?

For a little while last week, the conversation at the Holt Korea adoption board turned from referrals and travel calls to that most dangerous of Holy Trinities: religion, politics, and sex. Someone posted a poll asking for opinions on Catholic Charities’ decision to stop providing adoption services in Massachusetts. There were a few civilized exchanges, but it wasn’t long before the anti-gay remarks started flying, supported by Bible verses.

I was astounded. Then I thought back to a post on Julia’s blog about an acquaintance who made an remark complaining about the “Gay Agenda” at a book club Julia was hosting. I tried to imagine what would happen if someone came out with a gay-bashing comment at any event on my unglamorous social calendar: kiddie birthday party, weekly doggie play date, movie night with the girls. I think he or she would be shunned: perhaps politely, out of a desire to keep the peace, perhaps not so politely, but shunned nonetheless.

Now, I know I live in a liberal bubble, but honestly: are there still circles (outside of Bible study groups) where remarks like these are NOT received with incredulous gasps?

A few people came forward on the Holt thread to protest the pro-religious, anti-gay comments; sometimes, they protested the tone in which the comments were delivered. Immediately, the religious anti-gays came forward to complain that their religious freedoms were being abridged and their feelings not tolerated:

I often find it interesting that everyone calls for “tolerance”, [sic] but, oftentimes, people with “traditional values” do not garner the same sort of “tolerance” from those who are requiring “tolerance” from them.

A lot of the PUBLIC are religious and few seem to be able to TOLERATE that. It’s getting to the point where it’s the Christians who are being singled out and tolerance never seems to go the other direction. What the gay/lesbian lobby wants is total acceptance in every realm of society.

And…we have a Gay Agenda! What is the nefarious agenda? “Total acceptance”? The horror.

(Do you hear a tiny violin playing a sad, sad song for the poor Christians who are “singled out” for “intolerance”? Those pathetic, repressed people who make up a Moral Majority of the population? Who share their values with the president, the vice-president, and most of both houses of Congress?)

I couldn’t help responding to these comments, but Julie said it on Julia’s thread much better than I said it on the Holt thread:

“Disagreeing with [someone’s] being gay” is just like “disagreeing with someone’s being black,” or blonde, or short…. And if you’re going to disagree with such an immutable human trait — and by the way, if you’re dead set on being judgmental, let’s be precise and say you DISAPPROVE — then own that bigotry. Don’t try to dignify what is, at bedrock, bigotry as a stance deserving of protection and tolerance.”

Straight infertiles and gays have a lot in common, and I would love to see some of the Bible-thumpers get past the “gay as abomination” smokescreen so they could see it. First, we’re all forced to explore “alternative” methods to have children–assisted reproductive technology or adoption. Thus, laws regarding ART that may be established to hurt the “Gay Agenda” can easily hurt the “straight infertile” agenda as well. (Virginia, I’m looking at you.) Also, discriminatory stances against gay parents promote the concept that there is a scientifically valid ideal parenting model. Think about it: if people can be prohibited from adopting because they’re the wrong gender combination, what’s to stop the prohibition of transracial adoption, adoption of a child from a different religious background, or even international adoption? In all those cases, the adoptive placement certainly violates the two-parent, in-country, homogeneous race-and-religion ideal.

I leave you with one last quote from the thread:

Can I feel sad that children are adopted into homes by parents that are not only non-religious, but anti-Christian - absolutely, but I am never without hope that change can happen.

I’m hoping for change, too.