Angry at Zealots

May 12, 2007 by Dave.

I’ve been reluctant to write about a subject on one of my favorite web sites for a couple of weeks because it’s in response to other blogs and postings put up on the site. What’s sad about that is that is usually the blog I post with stuff I would rather not blog elsewhere due to privacy concerns and also it’s a community that I trust. However I don’t want to start a flaming war of any kind (which is sort of what this will turn out to be) so I’m posting this here for now.

On that site, there’s a woman who’s been posting stuff on her feelings on adoption. Her biggest problems stems from her having given up a child for adoption, had some contact with the family (photos and some letters) and then having contact cut off. Recently she’s become radicalized about forced adoption and coercive techniques used to get babies on the market for adoption. She’s using her energy and the site to speak about about and against the subject.

Now I know about adoption from a number of different angles:

1.    I myself am adopted (and so is my sister)

2.    Sophia’s mom is enduring a similar situation with her other daughter—she had her parental rights severed, the child was placed with another family with visitations, and then her visits were inexplicably taken away.

So I’m not necessarily opposed to her feelings on the matter. However she’s been talking about the Nazi adoption/assimilation program used to strengthen the Aryan race, and how there is a similar structure to adoption programs today. I’m not saying it never happens; history proves it does (famously with the Australian aborigines at the turn of the century and with the American Indians in the late 1800s; and in less known, more subtle ways with the African slave trade in the Americas and the Caribbean). However being transracially adopted and Jewish-Polish (my mother is Jewish of Russian-Polish descent; the modern story used in her tale was of a Polish adoptee) when you start bringing up Nazis and adoption, then you’ve hit a sore spot with me. Granted I was annoyed before this but that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. 

There is always a point where zealots go to far, and that was it for me. It got me to thinking about the problem with zealots and evangelists. While there are times what they may say is true and there is no doubt they themselves believe it (and sometimes rightfully so), they leave no room for opinions other than theirs. Everything is filtered through this new radical experience to an extent that that is all they see, and any other opinion is wrong or simply don’t get it. What’s worse, if taken to extreme they expect you to believe the same thing, and will say things over and over and over until you agree or are brainwashed. There is no sense of “this is what happened to me” rather than “this is the state of the world for all.” Or other times, it is “this is what happened to me” masquerading as “this is the state of the world”—using the argument of the latter to explain the former.

When it becomes blanket statements rather than personal specifics (”I” statements), it is trying to include everyone in their situation. Being someone who is generally happy with the parents I was adopted by, I resent it. I know that the laws of privacy, visitations, open/closed adoptions are there for justifiable reasons—reasons that protect both the child and the families in the situations. I don’t know everything about my biological parents, but I also haven’t been active in the search—partly by choice, partly by “out of sight, out of mind.” I have found out some things and I will no most everything in time, but I do know that it is also my issue to resolve and no one else’s.

Like I said, I personally know people in a situation where the adoption was problematic. I know she has issues of her own adoptive situation, and I am not unsympathetic. However when all statements so far have been to assume every adoptive situation is the same and all parties must rise up against the system, I will not support it not be a party to it. Eventually I’ll be able to talk about this more openly in different forums as well.

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