Again, another small update early this morning.

There is still time to get those faxes and emails in to the Senators asking them to

vote NO on HB 5428,

but time is running out.

The bill went through its second reading in yesterday’s session.

The bill’s status page hasn’t updated yet after yesterday’s session, but the legislation can go to third reading and on to a vote at any time now. Don’t wait for the state to update the page before you act.

PLEASE continue to contact the State Senators via phone calls and faxes, they need to understand that this is NOT an adoptee rights/open records bill.

It may masquerade as one, but this bill will actually HARM Illinois adoptees’ existing rights, putting a huge number of them them into yet another bureaucratic hell that will ensure some never gain their original birth certificates locked away behind:

• Vetoes,
• A beefed up version of Illinois already fatally flawed Confidential Intermediary system
• (with a year long ad campaign that still has no fiscal note attached to the bill)
• & new civil penalties and damages starting at $10,000 for anyone with mere possession of essentially a new criminalized category of information, that which is placed in the registry files, even if the Bastard never acts on that information or gains the information completely separate from it being “leaked” from the registry. (For example, learning names or dates, etc. from another relative.)

A bill by it’s very nature cannot be an adoptee rights bill if what little it gives a few adoptees comes at the direct and permanent expense to other adoptees.

HB 5428 does just that.

You don’t have to be directly affected by adoption to have good reason to oppose this bill.

Hell, genealogists should be screaming bloody murder right about now!

Again, here’s that contact list for the IL Senators.

The Senate is next in session Tuesday April 20th, 12:00 PM (Central Time Zone)

Bastard input injected into this process is vital, doubly so in light of how deeply the voices of the vast majority of adopted people have been almost entirely shut out of this process time and time again as this bill continues to go forward.

Think I’m being overly dramatic?

73adoptee has her first person account of what happened in the Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this week up on her blog. I’d strongly advise readers to go across and read through her post.

(Plus she gets extra bonus points in my personal ‘book’  for utilizing “V,” the 1983 miniseries version that is, as a central analogy in her piece.)