‘No friends but the mountains’

I rarely do videos related to my book on my story as an adoptee and U.S. adoption history, or on larger adoptee rights issues.

Last week, I decided to make one. Find my video here.

I made it on the fly, in response to a now-stalled and wildly discriminatory bill against adoptees in the California Assembly, AB 1302.

I needed to express my realization and my personal and sobering assessment of the cold, hard, and inequitable reality that adoptees continue to face in the political sphere. In that place where laws, politics, power, and culture collide, adoption remains a reliably bipartisan issue championed by Democrats and Republicans in states and nationally. We saw that with this bill in a state with a rock-solid Democrat super majority in the state legislature and control of the Governor’s office.

Here is reality as I see it based on the outcomes and the events that unfolded: Adoptees have no friends but the mountains.

I stand by this assessment because the facts point to this long-used Kurdish metaphor of being betrayed by all sides, which all of us can independently verify and see.

We do not have to like it, but confronting the underlying truth is critical to how one approaches solutions strategically. It is also relevant for what I see in my birth state of Michigan, where there is no effort by a Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, or its Democratically controlled legislature to even acknowledge denied human and legal rights to thousands of adoptees like me who were born there.

What happened and where is this bill in the California Legislature:

Apparently this measure is now stalled because it did not advance on the legislative calendar for this year.

However, I cannot independently confirm this based on the bill’s tracking record, but this has been reported by the Adoptee Rights Law Center. That would mean the measure is still ready to be heard in 2024 by the Assembly Health Care Committee. I think we all need to see this communicated clearly by the California Legislature too.

This measure is sponsored and championed by an anti-abortion, right-leaning state lawmaker, Assemblymember Tom Lackey (R-Palmdale). He is an adoptive parent of two children, and his anti-abortion voting record aligns with the wider GOP efforts to promote adoption as the so-called “policy alternative” to abortion.

As we’ve seen since the U.S. Supreme Court’s anti-women decision the 2022 Dobbs decision, this view is gaining momentum, to the detriment of adoptees and women and their rights to bodily autonomy.

In his deliberately dishonest presentation of what the bill would do, Lackey was joined by the proverbial “anti-adoptee” Quisling. I use that term for a person who is adopted and who supports legislation that harms the collective group of millions of adoptees. In this case it was a seasoned corporate lobbyist named Lance Hastings, who fulfilled the obligatory role of a Quisling we see whenever adoptees are sold out without regard to their inherent legal and human rights. “Quisling” is the appropriate word because the facts bear it out.

Both Lackey and the Quisling presented what I call false statements and framing comments that no one called out for what they were.

Before the hearing, adoptees and adoptee rights advocates, however, provided lawmakers ample documentation to call out such falsehoods. From what I saw, no comments were uttered by lawmakers who had that information.

Afterwards, Bastard Nation, which staunchly opposed this regressive and discriminatory measure, wrote a devastating analysis of everything wrong with this harmful proposed bill. That analysis noted: “AB1302 bill would not have flown 50 years ago much less today. It goes against current adoption culture, best practice standards, and the success of the adoptee rights and justice movement/OBC access. [Fourteen] states already unseal [original birth certificates] with no restrictions or conditions for the adoptees to which they belong.” Also go here to see the nightmare that AB 1302 would lead to if passed as written; the infographic is by Adoptee Rights Law, and is brilliant. Also see Adoptee Rights Law summary here.

The legislative kabuki during the bill hearing proved the hardest to watch and internalize. I say kabuki because that best describes the bill hearing for this toxic measure and how publicly disengaged logical allies were at the bill’s hearing on April 18, 2023, with the Assembly Judiciary Committee. (See the full hearing recording here, starting at around 37:00, with the CalOpens testimony against starting at 46:00.) The logical allies, many assume, would be California’s elected Democrats on the Assembly Judiciary Committee.

This committee has eight Democrats and three Republicans.

At no time did Democrats state facts provided to them by multiple adoptee rights advocates in advance that no adoptee rights group supported the measure or were consulted. At no time did Democrats state the most basic fact of all: that this bill and existing law deny all adoptees in California equal treatment by law.

Zip.

Nothing.

Silence.

And no on in that room needed anyone to tell them millions of adoptees, including all of those born in California, are denied equality by law.

That is the 800-pound gorilla that not one of them had the cojones to confront. Even worse, this Democrat-dominated committee recorded not one “no” vote.

Worse, it’s impossible to even tell during the roll call from the legislative video what the abstaining votes said when asked to publicly cast their vote. It sounded like mumbles so they would not heard, as they apparently cowered with their muffled public votes.

Adoptees can learn from the Kurds: they have no friends but the mountains

According to the legislative record, which is published however, eight committee members voted for it, and three “abstained.”

That’s called cowardice, because it is. I believe that is a factual statement too.

In short, adoptees were abandoned again by legislative silence and performance gestures.

The worst of the lies and talking point shared repeatedly in most legislative hearings, that a birth mother was promised confidentiality, was not corrected, even after a lawyer invited to the presenter table for reasons I still don’t understand openly lied to committee members that a so-called “presumed promise” of confidentiality to women coerced into surrendering their children to adoption existed.

For the record, no such legal promise has ever been made or documented in any court or legislative setting.

Bastard Nation in its submitted response on this bill addressed this canard that never, ever dies: “There is no evidence in any state that records were sealed to ‘protect’ the reputation or ‘privacy’ of biological parents who relinquished children for adoption. In the over 60 years of the adoptee rights struggle, not one single document has been presented anywhere that shows that birthparents were promised or guaranteed anonymity by the state or anyone else. If they were made on the sly, they were made by individuals who had no legal authority to do so.”

In the end, misinformation and kabuki prevailed.

Adoptees were abandoned by their likely but no-show “friends,” and the bill advanced.

Though this bill appears to be on hold until 2024—which I still can’t verify on the Legislature’s website—adoptees will have to confront their reality in other states and with the public.

Right now, they have no allies.

They have no “friends” willing to correct lies and misinformation when it counts and where it counts.

They are utterly on their own, as they always have been the last half-century of working tirelessly to end legal discrimination, rooted in my view in their illegitimate status.

So that is why I made my video, as a reminder of lived truth, which the historically persecuted Kurdish people have experienced since they were denied a nation state by conniving colonial powers after WWI. They have a saying, uttered at each violent, tragic betrayal by all nations, repeatedly since that time: “No friends but the mountains.”