These two links represent some very thoughtful analysis, placing adoption into it’s rightful broader context in relation to power, closed door secrecy, and well monied corporate interests.

First up, Bastardette has done a strong piece that isn’t about adoption except when it is:

Columbus Issue 12: Secrets = “More Information” (Not about adoption, but it is)

Every so often she’ll write a post that dances between the microcosm and the macrocosm, and this is a fine example.

In it, she writes about the efforts  to keep the Columbus, Ohio city council meetings open to the public. Tragically, in part due to the deceptive language on the measure, it passed creating a blind spot to Ohio’s sunshine laws just large enough to hold closed door secret meetings behind.

While on the face of it, this may appear to be nothing more than a local political matter, she ties the micro back up to the macro, bringing it back around to visibility into government and process, adoption secrecy, and how sunshine laws have another blind spot exception that we Bastards know all too well, the adoption exceptions. Our sealed records are ultimately not so very different from other forms of closed door secrecy.

Far from the watchful eyes of the public, behind those closed doors are where the deals are cut, be they purely political, or be they the crimes covered over and protected by state mandated adoption secrecy. Deprived of  access to the evidence, the very paperwork pertaining to our very lives, we too, are simply left in the dark, told to “trust them, they know what they’re doing” and accept whatever we are told unquestioningly.

In all a good read, and much fodder for thought in the piece.

What’s happening in Columbus public meetings today is not unlike what’s happening in adoption deform. Special money and special interests locking out those most affected. Secret making and secret keeping for “your own good.” Convoluted language. A willing, clueless public that wants to believe that the government has our or your best interests at heart. We are not fighting in a vacuum. Corruption and big money are all around us, and we need to keep exposing it and ridiculing it, and killing it. We have few friends and the public doesn’t care as long as it’s lied to and taken care of.

Secondly, be sure to click across to Niels’ latest over on Pound Pup Legacy:

The adoption industry and politics, an incestuous embrace

Rather than even attempting to pull a quote or two out of it, I strongly urge readers to read the entire piece.

Some time back I wrote a brief introduction to the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute Angels in Adoption awards in the course of writing an introduction to this year’s Demons of Adoption awards.

Niels’ piece, on the other hand cuts to the essential nature of the event and the “incestuous copulation of industry and politics under the pretext of the well-being of children.”

He shines the rare light of day on the interelationship of both policy makers and their multitudes of corporate lobbying lovers.

Again, please read the entire piece, it should be a foundational document core to any genuine understanding of the event and the players involved.