I really don’t like to do this but sometimes you have to put your hands in the dirt and dig to set the record straight. The dirt is in this case a blog post from May 19 by Katie Jay on her site Children Deserve Families (http://childrendeservefamilies.com/...). Her blog is a promotion vehicle for a by now almost dead legislation proposal on international adoption, Children in Families First (CHIFF). Many people in the adoption world oppose this legislation, because it doesn’t address serious problems in international adoption - like fraud, child theft and trafficking, coercion, corruption - doesn’t develop serious ideas how to support child welfare in ‘donor’ countries and focuses essentially on adoption of foreign kids by US parents, facilitated by American adoption agencies and adoption lawyers. It is profound criticism by prominent adoptees, that is by those who lived the experience, and by welfare and adoption specialists in our country as well in countries like Ghana, Haiti en Uganda.
Katie Jay and her CHIFF posse and CHIFF bosses never engaged in a dialogue with the critics. On the contrary: they shut them up, by closing comment sections of their Facebook pages for these individuals and by not inviting them for public events, by calling them trolls if they reacted on tweets. But that was obviously not enough: Katie Jay went the extra mile in her blog post by painting these critics as ‘most radical and mindless liberals’, a ‘wayward liberal fringe’, as ‘anti-Semites’, as religious intolerants, as promoters of ‘extremist groupthink’. Her source of all this are her earlier blog posts and a small unrelated column in Wall Street Journal by Daniel Henniger about the forced withdrawals of commencement speakers at a few prominent Universities (http://m.us.wsj.com/...), a piece to which she refers two times. The anti-Semitism remark is sourced by an unrelated piece from the web newspaper ‘The Times of Israel’ on the ADL’s worldwide survey on anti-Semitic attitudes.
All the opponents are defined in a manner we know from the extreme right and the extreme left. Agitprop that was called in my old days as a student: just smear your opponents to shut them down so you don’t need the discussion anymore. If CHIFF initially may have had a decent goal, which many critics doubt, a supporter like Katie Jay obscured and perverted that. And now away from the stench of the dirt and back to work.