Some people on another board have posted links, etc. about how some evangelical Christians have adopted children, not because they wanted to parent them, but to increase the numbers of, if you will, butts in the pews. The writer of this article even wrote a book about it.
It’s never been a secret that some people have pursued adoption for all the wrong reasons, and this is part of the reason, addressed in the story, why international adoption has become much more difficult in recent years. In short, there is speculation that this is being done to produce lots of adoptable children.
What has anyone else here heard, and what do you think?
Then I googled the place where some of the girls (our first sighting!) were taken, the Cayuga Centers:
And I had an uncomfortable feeling in my stomach. This whole thing has been so chaotic, so ad hoc, so disorganised, that I just can’t help but feeling that some people are going to take advantage of it. I don’t buy the theory that this was done to “increase the supply of adoptable children.” But it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if there are groups of evangelicals out there ready and willing to take these kids in to “give them a better life.”
Two days ago I made the same point to Pedro da Costa of Business Insider:
PdC: Imagine being raised by a family that endorses separating families.
JT: “Bob, we did what we had to. You couldn’t give me a child, and I entered this marriage expecting children. And… look, honey, now you have a son! Isn’t that what you always wanted?”
“But, Jane…”
(sharper) “Bob…”
:sigh: “Well, at least he is no longer in those camps…”
The kids can’t be imprisoned forever, many of them don’t even know who their parents are, other than by sight, and this administration has already announced that reunification isn’t a priority, while DHS and HHS are each arguing that the other agency has this responsibility.
So, senoy… given the above, what do you think is going to happen? What mechanism exists to reunite a 2 year-old in a concentration camp in Texas with his parents in Guatemala?
The conspiracy theory is not that children are taken away and some may never see their parents again. The conspiracy theory is that the purpose of separating these families is to produce adoptable Christian children. It’s nearly a blood libel. It’s ridiculously ludicrous, not least because these children are almost certainly Christians anyway and large numbers are Evangelicals. They are all more likely to be Evangelical than Americans as a whole, so the idea that they are being separated to make them Christians is ridiculous.
International adoption standards have become more stringent because of the sexual trafficking of children and the profits made by adopting out children who in fact have parents or other close relatives.
Some of the more wacko evangelicals, the politically-oriented “Jesus Camp” type (that is one scary movie, too) do not consider Catholics to be “real” Christians, and they may want these kids to be raised by them so they are the “right” kind.
Do I agree that this is a conspiracy? Who knows, with this administration? If it is, it may well be done for reasons completely unrelated to this.
The problem with “wacky” conspiracy theories is that most evil right-wingers aren’t organized or competent enough to engage in big conspiracies. Look at Turd-Dump’s cabinet: Instead of finding ways to divert billions to their pals, they’re content to pilfer private jet travel or cheat the taxpayer out of an office furniture set.
If you asked six Trumpists why they enjoy incarcerating babies, you’d get six different answers mostly reflecting stupidity rather than malice. But this doesn’t mean that notions like OP’s are completely wrong.(*) There are many players involved in policy-making, and Evangelists have a very big voice in this Administration. Are all these Evangelists pushing Trump to end the atrocity? It’s a safe bet that some (not most) Evangelist leaders find that the atrocity serves their agenda.
Recall the Trillion-dollar Cheney crime of 2003. Ask 7 top GOP decision makers why they wanted to invade Iraq and, if they answered honestly, you’d get 7 different answers. You don’t need all the decision makers to be on-board for the same evil agenda in order for the evil purpose to be pursued.
If they are eager to adopt older poor brown kids with unknown backgrounds, we have way more than 2,000 of those locally that the evangelicals are not currently lining up to adopt. Why would they want this 2,000 and not the ones already in the system?
It’s NOT ludicrous. There is historical precedent for non-orphan children being separated from their parents and adopted by parents the more powerful in society deem more suitable. The OP even has a link to a recent such movement. The “orphan trains” of the west were referred to. The Nazis took non-orphan children that looked like their notions of “Aryan” and adopted them out to loyal party members.
Sorry you don’t believe in historical fact. Please make an effort to enlighten yourself.
It’s not so much that the adopting parents - who may be unaware of the ethical quagmire behind the acquisition of their new child - want to convert the child as there is a meme of “rescuing” these kids from some horrible fate. A “horrible fate” that might have been generated in part or in whole by deliberate human action.
Because more and more of the brown parents of those local brown kids have lawyers and know their parental rights, so it’s a lot harder to sever parental rights for poor, brown US citizens than it used to be. The notion that it’s better to reunite rather than permanently dismantle families can be problematic when taken to extremes, as can just about everything, but it really has reduced the numbers of kids (of any color) available for adoption in the US.
Also - many of the kids genuinely needing adoption from the US population are “special needs” - they have disabilities, or are older, or have psychological problems and thus are less desirable than presumably normal kids physically sound enough to walk through a nation or two to get to the US. More than one set of adoptive parents have found out the hard way that foreign orphans can be just as problematic as the locally produced variety, with an extra helping of culture shock, and sometimes it turns out they’re not orphans after all and their biological families very much want them back.
I tend to think “producing adoptable children” is not a primary motive here, but it could be a side effect of the current policy that some people are ready to exploit for one reason or another.
The US is about 20-25% Evangelical. Central America is about 30-40% Evangelical and their numbers are growing. Those kids are more likely than random Americans to be Evangelical.
We also know that the two architects of the policy are Steve Miller who is Jewish and Steve Bannon who is Catholic. (Both nominally, I’m not sure either of their religions approve) We also know that the National Evangelical Association and about 70 other major Evangelical groups and denominations came out against the policy. Even Franklin F-in Graham who has drunk so much Trump branded Kool-Aid that he glows orange came out against it.
The evidence against such a ludicrous idea is extremely strong and the evidence for it seems to primarily be, “Those kinds of people are evil, so it’s the kind of thing they’d do.” Again, congratulations on being in on the ground floor of 21st century blood libel.
Absolutely children have been separated from their parents before as a sort of “soft genocide” or as a form of social control–or just to provide adoptable children for people who wanted them. But it seems highly unlikely that that is the motivation for this current policy: the administration has faced incredible (well-deserved and predictable) backlash over this, and it’s hard to see how all this could have been intended to engineer a few thousand adoptable children–especially since these are not the sort of children people traditionally line up to adopt: they are too old, too brown, and their past history (drug exposure? PTSD?) is too unknown.
At the sight of a self-professed Christian talking about blood libel as you have in this thread my irony meter just pegged to the top.
Seriously, “blood libel” is the accusations by Christians that Jews kidnapped and sacrificed Christian children to use and consume their blood in various rituals (never mind about 5,000 years of prohibition against both murder and the consumption of blood in Judaism). Now you’re claiming Christians are being accused of “blood libel”. Well, no - no one is claiming children are being kidnapped and their blood used in Christian worship. No one. Stop claiming you or your group is being “persecuted” when, really, you aren’t.
Your use of the term “blood libel” in the manner you have been is offensive to me. Please stop doing this.
No, I think it’s apt. What was blood libel? The unfounded accusation against a religious group that they were taking and abusing children as part of a religious conspiracy. This is nearly exactly the same thing. I get that the shoe is on the other foot (sort of, Evangelicals didn’t exist at the time of blood libel, but people within their general religious sphere perpetrated it. Although it is interesting that Catholic children were the victims in both stories), but how exactly is it different? It was just as wrong then as it is now. It’s the sort of thing that deserves just as much condemnation now as it should have been condemned then. It’s dehumanizing and abusive and has no place in this society or the society of 1000 years ago when it was wielded against Jews. Religious prejudice wielded against any group should not be tolerated.
The writer of this article even wrote a book about it.