Help those who are adopted enjoy the same right that you have had since birth, to know their parents.
Join the Green Ribbon Campaign
My readers have seen me complain, take a hard line and publish some outlandishly blunt photos and statements from time to time. I take a stand for anything I don’t think is right. While some people are happy to quietly disagree, I don’t mind me being the person out in front, with my photo for all to see. I have a voice and I’m not afraid to use it. The GLBTQ community has been my family for the last 26+ years of my life. I fight, but we are not the only people who are discriminated against. In this election year, there is another important issue that deserves some attention.
I have no less than a half a dozen close friends who are adopted. I have seen the things that they have struggled with and the fights that they have quietly been fighting for far too long. There is now a movement that is pushing for access to adoption records. Did you know that most adoptees have no access to the records that would tell them who their birth parents are?
Assuming that there are some out there who FOOLISHLY think that this is okay, ‘because it protects people’, let me tell you that this thinking is not only ridiculous and wrong on so many levels…it also infringes on the basic human right that you take for granted…to know where you come from. Why is this important? Please read the statement below, taken directly from the website for the Green Ribbon Campaign, the organization working tirelessly to open adoption records in EVERY state!
from the Green Ribbon Website:
Why is adoption records access important?
It’s about identity! Only two categories of American citizens cannot obtain a copy of their original birth certificates: persons in the FBI’s witness protection program and adoptees. Adoptees grow up with questions about identity. Questions that affect their psycho-social development, sometimes in negative ways. Like all humans, adoptees seek to answer the questions “who am I?” and “why am I here?”
Adoptees are legally prohibited from obtaining information that is critical to answering that question. But it is a necessary tool for most adoptees to answer those nagging questions about our origins. Knowing is better than not knowing. Knowing the truth is healing for most of us. But fear of discovery, not as you might imagine for parents who surrendered a child to adoption, but for adoption professionals who misrepresented the facts to vulnerable women or couples wishing to adopt, makes for a powerful motive to keep the truth hidden.
When access to one’s original birth certificate (OBC) is forbidden, the only substitute is to search for one’s family of origin. If state officials are intent on protecting the identity of parents who were persuaded to relinquish a child to adoption the surest method is to provide answers to the questions asked. Many adoptees would be satisfied just to know the truth. Contact is a different matter and no reasonable person on either point of the adoption triangle expects a relationship to automatically develop with strangers, even strangers who are biologically related. Adoptees, generally, are not seeking a family, but themselves.
Folks, no one could say it any better. Help these people know who they are, so that when they look in the mirror they don’t wonder who they look like for the rest of their lives. 😦
TWITTER FOLLOW THEM – @grcadoption
CONTACT THEM – info@campaign4openrecords.org.
FACEBOOK PAGE – http://www.facebook.com/groups/267938470001/
Butch Ramblings 