In 2008, a 38-year old Oklahoma nurse whom I’ll call Kelly adopted an eight-year old girl, “Mary,” from Ethiopia. It was the second adoption for Kelly, following one from Guatemala. She’d sought out a child from Ethiopia in the hopes of avoiding some of the ethical problems of adopting from Guatemala: widespread stories of birthmothers coerced to give up their babies and even payments and abductions at the hands of brokers procuring adoptees for unwitting U.S. parents. Now, even after using a reputable agency in Ethiopia, Kelly has come to believe that Mary never should have been placed for adoption. She came to this determination after hiring what’s known as an adoption searcher.

Adoption searchers — specialized independent researchers working in a unique field that few outside the community of adoptive parents even know exists — track down the birth families of children adopted from other counties. In Ethiopia, searching has arisen in response to a dramatic boom in international adoptions from the country in recent years. In 2010, Ethiopia accounted for nearly a quarter of all international adoptions to the U.S. The number of Ethiopian children adopted into foreign families in the U.S., Canada, and Europe has risen from just a few hundred several years ago to several thousand last year. The increase has been so rapid — and, for some, so lucrative — that some locals have said adoption was “becoming the new export industry for our country.”

Read more …

ONE DAY LAST NOVEMBER, a group of teenage girls dressed in long khaki skirts and modest blouses stepped onto the stage at an Independent Fundamental Baptist church in Maryland where Jeannie Marie (a military spouse who asked that her last name not be used) attended services with her family. The young women, visitors from a Missouri girls’ home called New Beginnings Ministries, sang old-time hymns, recited Scripture, and gave tearful testimonies about their journeys out of lives of sin. Headmaster Bill McNamara spoke, too, depicting the home as a place where girls could get on track academically, restore broken relationships, and learn to walk with God.

New Beginnings describes itself as a character-building facility for “troubled teens,” and what Jeannie Marie heard in church that day was that this might be a place for her daughter to heal. While jogging earlier that year, the 17-year-old (whom I’ll call Roxy) had been pulled into a vehicle and assaulted by a group of men. Since then, she had begun acting up at home, as well as sneaking out and drinking. Two weeks after seeing the girls in church, Jeannie Marie and her husband left Roxy in McNamara’s care with the promise that she would receive counseling twice a week and stay at New Beginnings no longer than two months. “It sounded like a discipleship program,” Jeannie Marie recalls. “A safe place where a daughter can go to have time alone to find God and her direction.”

Read all…

In late March Craig Juntunen told a group of Christian adoption advocates assembled at a Chandler, Arizona, home about his plans to increase international adoptions fivefold. Just over a year before, the world had been riveted by the saga of Laura Silsby, the American missionary arrested while trying to transport Haitian children across the Dominican border. But the lessons of that scandal seemed far from Juntunen’s mind as he described his “crusade to create a culture of adoption” by simplifying adoption’s labyrinthine ethical complexities to their emotional core. Juntunen, a former pro football quarterback and the adoptive father of three Haitian children, has emerged as a somewhat rogue figure in the adoption world since he recently founded an unorthodox nonprofit, Both Ends Burning. He has commissioned a documentary about desperate orphans in teeming institutions, Wrongfully Detained, and proposed a “clearinghouse model” that will raise the number of children adopted into US families to more than 50,000 per year.

Juntunen acknowledges that many adoption experts find his proposals naïve, particularly in a year that witnessed scandals in Haiti, Nepal and most recently Ethiopia, where widespread irregularities and trafficking allegations may slow the once-booming program to a crawl. He met a chilly reception recently at the Adoption Policy Conference at New York Law School when he spoke alongside State Department officials. But Juntunen insists that his ideas for increasing adoption constitute a social movement, akin to the civil rights movement, and that the force of a growing “adoption culture” will help them prevail.

In this expectation, he may be right. In Arizona, Juntunen was speaking with Dan Cruver, head of Together for Adoption, a key coalition in a growing evangelical adoption movement. The event was the first of the organization’s new “house conferences”: small-scale meet-ups bolstering an active national movement that promotes Christians’ adopting as a way to address a worldwide “orphan crisis” they say encompasses hundreds of millions of children. It’s a message Cruver also emphasizes in his book Reclaiming Adoption—one in a growing list of titles about “orphan theology,” which teaches that adoption mirrors Christian salvation, plays an essential role in antiabortion politics and is a means of fulfilling the Great Commission, the biblical mandate that Christians spread the gospel.

Read all…

This week an Irish broadcaster revealed a Vatican letter from 1997 that appears to advise bishops to withhold priest sex abuse allegations from the police. The letter, written in response to Irish bishops’ policy of “mandatory reporting” and leaked by an Irish bishop, has been hailed by victim advocacy groups who hope this smoking gun will lead to definitive proof of the efforts of the Catholic hierarchy to impede prosecution of abusive priests.

As Catholic sex abuse scandals once again dominate headlines from Boston to Belgium, and even the fast-track canonization of Pope John Paul II is marred by questions of culpability, the role of the Catholic hierarchy in enabling clergy abuse seems indisputable, admitted even by die-hard church partisans like the Catholic League. But what’s less understood is how these same patterns persist in today’s Church, where demographic shifts and a dwindling priesthood may be creating a new set of scenarios for abuse.

Read all …

Last week, The New York Times Magazine ran a feature article on “biblical womanhood,” a subject I wrote about extensively in my 2009 book, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.

In the far-right evangelical communities I reported on, “biblical womanhood” guidelines aimed to create a new evangelical, anti-feminist Renaissance Woman: a submissive warrior who obeys her husband, homeschools their children and “dies to the self” by putting aside her own desires to accept God’s plan for her as helpmeet to her husband.

Throughout four years of reporting on the subject, I found a great many women who defended the lifestyle of submission and patriarchy—their words—as not only biblical but also the best protection for women. I also found a lot of women who revealed, after they’d left patriarchal churches, that the culture of submission had enabled domestic violence at home, had left them stranded in a community where submitting to an unreasonable or tyrannical husband is lauded as a virtue or, in more pedestrian tragedies, had compelled them to sacrifice their own ambitions for those of their husband.

In the Times, however, author Molly Worthen only found biblical womanhood, or “complementarianism”—the theology that holds that God created the sexes not for equal functions but to complement each other—as a harmonious partnership that might “make feminists cheer.” In this image of benevolent patriarchy, women are protected by “servant-leader” husbands while separate-but-equal gender roles don’t preclude women following their dreams.

After a year of “grizzly-mama feminism,” what could logically follow but the argument that fundamentalist gender roles can be feminist, too?

Read all…

This past January, when Scott Roeder stood trial for the murder of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, he described his preparations for the crime.

For years, Roeder had gathered information about Tiller’s schedule and habits by showing up outside Tiller’s Wichita, Kan., clinic as a “sidewalk counselor.” At the same time that Roeder was “counseling” on the sidewalk—trying to talk women out of having abortions—he was beginning to determine if there was a “window of opportunity” that would leave the doctor exposed.

CPCs have long had connections with the most extremist anti-abortion cohorts. The zealous anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, which doggedly pursued Dr. Tiller, has long urged its supporters to get involved with CPCs and sidewalk counseling. In its 1990s guide “How to Stop Abortion in Your Community,” Operation Rescue of California recommended volunteering at the local CPC and sidewalk counseling “right at the doors of the abortion mill.”

Read a short excerpt.

In the past few weeks, Delaware Congressional candidate Christine O’Donnell has come under ridicule for seeming embellishments to her résumé. A CV posted on the networking site LinkedIn transformed a 2001 summer seminar she attended in rented space at Oxford University into a term of study at the school, and represented a week-long fellowship at the right-wing think tank the Claremont Institute as graduate coursework at Claremont Graduate University. Although, at O’Donnell’s request, the profile has since been taken down—her campaign claimed the enhanced resume was a fake posted to embarrass her (a charge LinkedIn expressly would not confirm, and other sources seem to refute), the real story is what O’Donnell actually did learn at the Claremont Institute, and how thoroughly the candidate absorbed its viciously antigay politics.

Read all …

Glenn Beck’s efforts to transform himself from Fox News demagogue into a religious leader for Tea Party America has a lot of commentators discussing the feasibility of a Mormon convert leading a wary evangelical and Catholic right in a faith-driven cause. While there are significant roadblocks hindering Beck’s quest for leadership in the Christian Right, he wouldn’t be the first Mormon to advocate a right-wing alliance that stretches across faiths. Beck follows hundreds of Mormon “pro-family” activists who have united with conservative Catholics and evangelicals to form a common front in the culture wars.

Since 1997, when Beck was just a baby Mormon, a coalition of mostly-U.S.-based religious right groups, the World Congress of Families, has attempted to rally religious conservatives at international “pro-family” conferences to transcend theological differences to unite against common enemies: feminism, homosexuality, liberal attitudes towards sexuality and reproductive rights, and the separation of church and state.

Read all …

In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, recalls Calle Almedal, a longtime HIV/AIDS advocate, Catholic hospitals and other institutions which were mainly staffed by nuns were the only ones that would treat patients dying of AIDS. From New York City to Uganda, as AIDS victims were shunned by hospitals and left to die at home, often the only facilities that would take them in were Catholic.

It reminds Almedal, a gay man and a Catholic who has worked at the intersection of faith-based organizations and AIDS for more than a decade, of an encounter in 1986 with an Irish nun who worked in a Catholic hospital. “She looked at me with her very blue eyes and said, ‘Mr. Almedal, do you think that condoms are the only solution?’ I said no, and she looked at me and said, ‘Nor do I.’ The nun and her staff were distributing condoms. And they were talking about abstinence.”

This disconnect between talk and action that stands out in Almedal’s mind has long characterized faith-based work on HIV/AIDS, as religious groups working in the field part ways with the strictures of their traditions and hierarchies, and in recent years the mandates of conservative American funders, in order to deliver potentially life-saving resources to populations most vulnerable to the disease.

“The doctrine is there, but then you have the pastoral care, which is about the reality that people live in,” Almedal says. “And that’s where those nuns were – out there in reality, and they gave realistic advice to people.”

But the principled duplicity of these private acts of resistance seems, in recent years, to have hardened into a new status quo when it comes to partnerships between US and even international funding organizations – meant to be part of the “evidence-based community” – and the conservative FBOs that proudly are not. After six years of billions of dollars of conditional HIV/AIDS funding from the US PEPFAR program, the landscape for FBOs and HIV is incontrovertibly altered, and not all for the good. With rising HIV rates – thanks to abstinence-only education in Africa – and an apparent (and possibly related) spike in anti-gay campaigns across the continent, the global AIDS community might be witnessing a new phase of the old equation: that silence, even silent dissent, can equal death.

Read all …  (pdf)

This February, a highly provocative series of 65 billboards went up around Atlanta, which featured an African American infant and the proclamation, “Black Children Are an Endangered Species.” The signs directed viewers to a website, TooManyAborted.com, created by the Radiance Foundation—a vaguely defined antiabortion and “personal transformation” nonprofit founded by biracial advertising executive Ryan Bomberger—with funding from Georgia Right to Life.

At the unveiling of the billboards, Georgia Right to Life Minority Outreach Director Catherine Davis explained their justification: “Planned Parenthood’s Negro Project,” she said, “is succeeding.” She was referring to a 1939 project begun by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger that has inspired decades of claims that family planning is a racist plan to wipe out populations of color. It’s an old argument, with roots in the Black Power and Black Nationalist movements. But in recent years it has become the province of anti-abortion groups who are selectively co-opting civil rights rhetoric to present abortion and even contraception as eugenicist plots disguised as voluntary reproductive choices, which are leading to a slow “Black genocide.”

Recent studies by the Guttmacher Institute found that abortion rates are indeed higher among women of color. African Americans, in particular, are thirteen percent of the population but account for 37 percent of all abortions. However, Guttmacher determined, this is due to their greater incidence of unwanted pregnancies, resulting from economic inequality and poor access to contraception and education. Nonetheless, the anti-abortion movement holds that Black and brown populations are being targeted – rather than served – by abortion providers who deliberately place clinics in inner-city, low-income neighborhoods.

Read all …