My daily trawl for blog fodder always presents something interesting, but often some of it at least consists of the make-my-teeth-hurt grating variety. That seems to be the flavor of the day on the international adoption front. Oh, goodie.

Starting out with some very iffy celebrity adoption-related stories circulating around the fringes of what might be called news, this story claiming that Angelina Jolie's daughter Zahara has a birth mother in Ethiopia... more

Angelina Jolie has been talking to Anderson Cooper about Cambodia, among other things.

"I fell in love with the people of Cambodia," she told Cooper, "and I was sitting with a little kid playing blocks and feeling like my son was somewhere there. And he was."

As well as discussing her extensive humanitarian and... more

I'm tempted to kick myself for making much of Mirah (aka Marsha) Riben's latest spew of mediocre pap designed to turn Mothers Day into a drive-by slapping.

Please don't misunderstand; I'm not regretting pointing out the poor quality of the prose, even though the simpy writing does speak for itself, or her agenda-encumbered POV that reduces any part of the big picture to the narrowest of misleading apertures.... more

It's not been long since I felt compelled to address a poorly composed bit of tripe from anti-adoption swill-tosser and Origins co-founder Mirah (aka Marsha) Riben.

The last time, she was slinging words that accused international adoptive parents of being racists and perpetrators of "cultural genocide".

(For a look at this from an cultural anthropologists view, ... more

This continues on from the last post. During Gay's house building trip to Cambodia last year, she spent some time at AOA, my kids' former orphanage, on our behalf, dropping off gifts and recent pictures of our kids for nannies.... more

Wish I'd seen this yesterday, but perhaps it's not too late to email in some impact on the New Jersey Senate's vote today on S-2249 , a family leave bill that would include adoptive parents.

This could be groundbreaking, so if New Jersey is your state and you'd like to see adoptive families get the same benefits as those making their kids from scratch, email the heads of the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee, Sens. Bernard Kenny (SenKenny@njleg.org) and Sharpe James (SenJames@njleg.org).

To read all about it, see ... more

Celebrity and international adoption go together like soup and sandwich in the media, and so many people are happy as clam chowder to be served up whatever can be scraped from the bottom of whatever pot happens to be going around at any given moment ... most of it unpleasant pap with a revolting flavor and lingering aftertaste.

I'm... more

I have been known to blather on and on on my blogs, both the International and Older Parent Adoption Blogs, about celebrities, adoption, and the media warp that manifests every time someone with a household name decides to add to their family by adopting a child. I take it all quite personally, actually, when reporters slam adoptive parents, famous or no, and go to the lengths... more

After taking more than a little bit of my time to compose a response to a request for comment on Angelina Jolie's adoptions from a reporter from the New York Post, I was irked, but not surprised, to see what ended up in print.

My comments came from both heart and head, were reasonable, fair and balanced. Not, apparently, what they were going for at the Post.The... more

A while back I blogged about the media warp around Angelina Jolie's adoptions. A bit later, I wrote another about the surprising appearance of a misquote from that blog... more