Read on Twitter
On Monday, I wrote a piece for @Newsweek criticizing @Bethany Christian Services for the adoption agency’s new “anti-racism” agenda. (1/21) https://www.newsweek.com/wokeness-has-come-adoption-its-children-who-will-suffer-opinion-1587611
The same dangerous racial ideology that has infected our schools, our workplaces and our politics has now come for the most vulnerable children in this country. (2/21)
Now @bethany has complained to my boss @aei that I am misrepresenting their position. And that I’ve dragged “the critical work of the child welfare system into the polarizing world of tribal politics.” I have some thoughts. (3/21)
Bethany says it is time to overturn a federal nondiscrimination law called the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act, which was passed by a bipartisan coalition in 1994. (4/21)
Black children at the time were languishing in foster care. And groups like the National Association of Black Social Workers said it is better for those kids to stay in foster care than to be adopted into a white family, which they likened to slavery. (5/21)
Thankfully folks like Sens. Mike DeWine and Mary Landrieu decided that black kids should not be sentenced to years in temporary homes and institutions because of the color of their skin and MEPA forbade taking race into consideration when placing kids in adoptive homes. (6/21)
Bethany says they want to end MEPA, not because they oppose transracial adoption—no! they celebrate it!—they just think that many white people should not do it because they lack proper racial sensitivity training. (7/21)
“White parents should be able to meet the unique needs of the children of color they adopt.” Call me crazy (I’ve been cancelled before. Thanks, @chronicle), but I think black kids have the same needs as all kids—love, safety, security, education, moral guidance. (8/21)
Just like other kids, they should be told that slavery was America’s original sin, that Jim Crow laws were inhumane and unconstitutional, that America has made astonishing progress, even electing a black president, (9/21)
That there are still racists in this country but they are statistically unlikely to affect the trajectory of your life. (10/21)
Bethany says they’re worried the safety of black children because they say the law forbids adoption agencies from turning down “white supremacists” who want to adopt black children. (11/21)
(Would love to see the line of Klansmen chomping at the bit to bring black foster kids into their homes.) (12/21)
Bethany says they want to change MEPA in order to target sensitivity training at parents who want to adopt transracially. Of course, there’s no reason why they can’t offer the training to everyone. Just about every adoption agency does. (13/21)
They say that “transracially adoptive parents … hunger for more support so they can better parent their children.” (14/21)
No kidding. If you tell white people that they’re all racists and we live in a country plagued by systemic racism of course they’re going to ask for support… (15/21)
Bethany says that their report is based on the “lived experience” of the families and adoptees they work with. (16/21)
What my article offered was empirical evidence. Evidence from a meta-study of all of the longitudinal surveys on transracial adoption showing that outcomes were no different for black adoptees into white families and black adoptees into black families. (17/21)
Evidence that there are 20,000 more kids adopted out of foster care per year now compared with the years before the law was passed. (18/21)
But how to weigh such evidence against the need for parroting the latest woke ideology? Of course Bethany believes Black Lives Matter but do they believe these black lives matter? (19/21)
If they did they would worry about the message they are sending to families who open their homes to vulnerable kids of all races. Many of these mothers and fathers will assume they are incapable of bridging this racial divide and just ask for a white kid. (20/21)
But then this kind of segregation is exactly the goal of the “anti-racist” movement that Bethany now supports. (21/21)
