Each year for the past four years Pound Pup Legacy (advocates for child safety within the foster care and adoption system) have offered a respite/cold hard dose of sanity and relief from the from the dreadful  Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute‘s annual Angels in Adoption awards: PPL’s annual Demons of Adoption Awards.

The Angels in Adoption with their corporate and adoption industry sponsorship make up a somewhat predictable usual motley crew (link opens a PDF) of:

• adoption industry figures
• lawyers and  judges
• adoption marketers
• serial child collectors
• theologically based adopto-philes
• church based adoption schemes
• celebrity do-gooder types
• & adoption apologists, etc.

that the adoption industry and their congressional buddies feel like conferring their self congratulatory honor upon.

The Demons of Adoption awards on the other hand, are one of the few places where reality intrudes upon the adoption industrial community’s self-referential bubble.

PPL’s Demons nominees are those who have gone above and beyond the day to day ongoing corruption of the adoption slime pool to merit special attention and singling out for their crimes and cruelties.

They are awarded their prizes based not on who the adoption industry thinks has done an outstanding job of promoting their interests, but on the votes of Adoptees, parents, and even adopters for their unique flair in opposing our human/civil/identity rights and making adoptionland the ‘special’ place we all know so very intimately.

The previous years’ winners have been quite a deserving lot:

• First Annual Demons of Adoption Awards (award went to the National Council for Adoption)
• Second Annual Demons of Adoption Awards (award went to the makers of Juno)  see  Juno, winner of the second Annual Demons of Adoption Awards
• Third Annual Demons of Adoption Awards (award went to Bethany Christian Services)  see Bethany Christian Services recipient of the Demons of Adoption Awards 2009

This year’s award is still up for grabs, and fortunately there’s still plenty of time to vote.  You can vote for your favorite candidate anytime before October 30th here:

Fourth Annual Demons of Adoption Awards

From the PPL page:

The nominees are:

• LDS Family Services: for being the most secretive of all adoption agencies, using coercive tactics in obtaining infants for adoption and having no respect for father’s rights;
• Gladney center for adoption: for being one of the most profit-centered agencies around and blocking open record efforts in Texas;
• Christian World Adoption: for their involvement in “harvesting” practices in Ethiopia and their blind ambition to “save” each and every “orphan” in this world;
• Larry S. Jenkins: for his involvement in nearly every case where father’s rights were violated;
• Joint Council on International Children’s Services: for promoting the interest of adoption agencies at the expense of children, and pushing agency friendly legislation in Congress;
• Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute for giving their seal of approval to persons and organizations that promote the interests of the adoption industry and pushing agency friendly legislation in Congress;
• Council on Accreditation: for their lack of research done on inter-country adoption agency histories prior to giving out Hague accreditation;
• American Adoption Congress: For failing to remove state reps who were openly working against open access for adult adoptees;
• American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey: for opposing open records for adoptees and “protecting” closet moms, based on a “stack of anonymous letters” claimed to be from “birthmothers”.
• Christian Alliance for Orphans: for promoting the business interests of adoption agencies through churches.
• Southern Baptist Convention: for passing resolution no. 2 , pushing the business interests of adoption agencies to the members of their church;
• Adoption.com for systematically banning voices that oppose current adoption practices and their continuous pro-adoption propaganda;
• Scott Simon: for his vomit-inducing book “Baby, We Were Meant For Each Other” and his grotesque crying and blubbering about his purchasing of another human being;
• WE tv: for their hideously exploitative series ‘Adoption Diaries,’ turning what is a highly emotive and complex topic into ‘reality’ show fodder.

With so many truly deserving candidates, as always, it can be a difficult choice.

While it’s too late to add nominees to the list, personally, I think there were plenty of other well deserving candidates.

A few personal honourable mentions would have to go to:

• Laura Sislby, Charisa Coulter, Central Valley Baptist Church, and the multiple teams of “New Life Children’s Refuge” missionaries- what with their spectacular little international incident/adventures in child trafficking in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Central Valley deserves special mention in that it allowed Silsby’s non-existent “Refuge” to use its tax status.
• PBS’s POV- for it’s multiple nights worth of adoption films run up towards national adoption month (November) and ongoing desire to use our adoption related stories as but fodder for their overarching adoption narrative.
• Adam Pertman, of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute- for time and again, co-opting our voices and flat out stepping in it. Be that going on NPR and advocating a national reunion registry while trying to promote the institute’s policy paper that called for not merely no such thing, but actually decried registries as problematic,  comparing Bastards making first contact to unwelcome telemarketers, or his ongoing speaking engagement comparisons between adoption and slavery (oh, eyeroll! How many times have we as a community been over this? For that matter how many MORE times are we going to have to continue to do so?)
• FamilyLife/Hope for Orphans- the church “mobilizing,” save the savages adoption obsessed christian ministry behind the “orphan Sunday” effort.

Without a doubt, there are always more Demons of Adoption than there ever will be time to write about them and their various misdeeds.

Which is not to say there are not those well deserving of a bit more detailed description. In that spirit, as but one example, Bastardette has also blogged about this year’s nominees and the importance of the American Adoption Congress’s role in the Illinois disaster. They are another, more than deserving candidate.

Consumer Alert! Demons of Adoption Candidates Ready for YOUR Vote

The AAC was nominated for failing to remove state reps who were openly working against open access for adult adoptees. I have no idea who nominated the AAC, but…members of Bastard Nation alerted the AAC as early as 1999 to what Melisha Mitchell up to in Illinois, but nobody with any clout seemed to care. Now Illinois has the worst “access” law in the country and the AAC finds itself waiting in the La città infuocata di Dite–Dante’s City of Dis– for the final count.

Kerry and Niels of Pound Pup Legacy have written a very insightful piece concerning the ongoing problems related to choosing but a single candidate each year, see their important piece, Looking beyond the demons of adoption. Pulling some quick excerpts:

The Angels in Adoption Award gala is an adoption agency’s love fest with all the pomposity of congressional allure. It openly shows the intimate embrace of special interest groups and federal government, more so than in any other field of business.

There is no congressional Angel’s in Petroleum Award, or an Angels in Financial Derivatives and Collateralized Debt Obligations Award. There is not even an Angels in Army Technology Award. With all these branches of business, members of congress have to at least presume a certain distance. Even when a member of congress is actually in bed with a certain special interest group, a pretense of independence is maintained.

I’ve added a personal emphasis in the below because I feel the bolded portions provide critical keys towards understanding:

The Angels of Adoption Awards shamelessly shows the exchange of this political capital for the business interests of the adoption industry. Members of Congress get the opportunity to demonstrate their pro-adoptionism, and the industry gets Congress’s seal of approval, translating in minimal federal regulation of the adoption industry. Federal regulation is even so loose that the accreditation of agencies has been delegated to a private agency (Council on Accreditation) founded and controlled by child welfare organizations. A typical case of Washington making a fox guard the hen house.

When we created the Demons of Adoption, it was of course a well deserved parody of the Angels of Adoption, and that it still is. At the same time the Demons of Adoption, like their counterpart, the Angels of Adoption, only highlight. No agency or attorney is as angelical as Members of Congress want us to believe, but neither are the demons of adoption so exceptionally evil. For every nominee there are several others equally guilty of unethical practices. The Demons of Adoption Awards show us the darkest corners of adoption, but don’t tell us much about the darkness of the adoption industry as a whole.

Only when we learn to see the “bad guys” in adoption as the most depraved examples in a pool of depravity, does it all make sense. Business methods, used by the worst agencies of our time, are the same business methods used by “demons of adoption” a century ago. Coerced relinquishment, fraudulent paperwork, the use of a jurisdictional maze, illegal payments, all of that is not a recent invention, but have been part and parcel of the adoption business ever since its introduction.

No matter how CCAI tries to polish a turd, the trade in children remains a dirty business. Some organizations may stink more than others, and therefore deserve special attention through our Demons of Adoption Awards, but that doesn’t mean other organizations don’t produce a similar stench. Only when we see the systemic rancidity of the adoption industry and its incestuous relations with policy makers, will we be able to change the system in a way that finally the best interest of children is served, and not the business interests of those involved in the trade of children.

In the end, no matter who the winner for this year ends up being, they’re all ‘winners’ in my book.