Once I was done with the press I moved onto blogs, and found a bunch of interesting reading (not all recent) including The Daily Bastardette. While there I stumbled across this incredible letter which read into the Ontario legislative record on May 5, 2005 by Tory MP Frank Klees (now running for Ontario Tory leader) during the debates about Bill 183.
There's a lot to comment on about this letter, but I'll save that for afterwards. For now, here it is verbatim:
Dear Mr. Klees,
I am writing as a responsible parent and husband living my life with my family and until recently, very contentedly in your riding. Sir, for the very first time in my life, I am afraid. I am afraid of the government of Ontario's announced intention to abrogate the province's long-standing adoption law, a law that guaranteed the privacy of both the adopted child and adoptive parents from those who, at a time of their choosing, might seek to interject themselves into the private social dynamic of the adopted child and their nuclear ‘life’ family.
For reasons of privacy and discretion, I choose, as I am sure countless others would also choose, to withhold my name. But I know you, sir, and ironically, I also know the Premier and his family and they know ours. But all they know is that we have tried to live our lives honourably and that we attend church, pay our taxes, volunteer and vote. We also take care to mind our own affairs and to never visit our attitudes and cultural norms on others.
We are a tolerant, dutiful and hopefully caring family, but sir, we do have a distinction from other families in our circle. We are all adoptees: both generations. Our children have never been told that they are adopted, and my wife and I, being only children, have never told our friends, business and professional associates or neighbours.
We have enjoyed the anonymity our silence and right to privacy has afforded us and our children. We were never subjected to the systemic prejudices the adopted suffer in humiliating silence almost every day. When we did poorly in school, no teacher ever raised their eyebrow in that knowingly condescending fashion and asked, ‘Oh, would Johnny be adopted?’ When our parents died, we were not singled out by the Toronto Star as ‘the adopted children of.’ We were instead listed as ‘the loving children of.’
We were never actually told we were adopted ourselves until our parents passed away, and by that time we had become the sum collective of their beings and were content to be so. Our children have been raised as our own, as in fact we were, and they are the inheritors of all that our parents once were and loved and all that my wife and I hold to be dear.
My wife and I discovered very little about the circumstances surrounding our birth. Both she and I thank God that our knowledge of such events and people are remote and intangible. For our children, however, the horrifying background and circumstances surrounding their earliest circumstances should never see the light of day. I remember the judges in the adoption courts assuring my wife and I that these haunting shadows would never be visited upon them. Now all of this is in doubt and my family is threatened by its own government.
Mr. Klees, there is much I have left out. Cryptic references aren't exactly the kind of documentation you are probably looking for in your defence of our family's privacy. I do, however, implore you to speak to the other members of the Legislature, to halt this attack on the thousands of defenceless families in Ontario who have adopted and been adopted with the clear understanding that our records were to be permanently sealed and that we were free to lead our lives (like everyone else) within the context of the lives we had actually lived, not the denial-laced pseudo-lives this legislation would lay at our door.
Mr. Klees, we and the thousands of voiceless and defenceless adoptees and adoptive parents need the Legislature to amend this bill and to take out the retroactive aspects of the disclosure provisions.
I ask you and your colleagues to change the nature and content of this proposed bill.
On behalf of my wife and family, thank you for your interest and compassion in this matter. I know you know of what I speak.
Wow. It's hard to know where to begin. Another time, I might feel compelled to challenge the assertion of guaranteed privacy for adoptees, but there's no such more to speak to that I'm just going to sail on past that.
I could also argue that by santimoniously summarizing his churchgoing, community-serving, straight-arrow lifestyle he is broadcasting a message about its worth and thus projecting his "attitudes and cultural norms" upon us all, something he claims to ahbor. But I'll sail past that too.
No, the truly stunning part is the miserable picture he paints of an adoptee's life, a life of almost Dickensian misery, a daily struggle against shame, abuse and haughtly sneers, forever coping with second-class status. Now I'll grant you I grew up after illegitimacy had lost most of its stigma, but the shocking part was not the degree of utter misery in the portrait of an adoptee—it's that as the writer relates this horrific existence with such authority he simultaneously denies ever having had firsthand knowledge of it!
I have no idea what the writer was referring to with the mention of the Toronto Star. He seems to believe that all of us "out of the closet" adoptees live our daily lives as sons and daughters forever weighed down by adjectives, distinguished and diminished. This shows, better than anything else perhaps, how clueless the writer is about the daily lives of adoptees who don't live under totalitarian regimes of secrecy regarding their adoptedness.
I am an "adopted son" when I want to be and a "son" the rest of the time, and have always felt that revealing my adoptedness was my choice to make; never have my parents or any other authority figures obliged to reveal it or hide it. Granted, maybe my parents were enlightened in that regard, but I don't think they were that unusual.
The most objectionable point, though, is that the writer openly admits to keeping his kids in the dark about their adoptedness; even stronger, he demands further government aid in perpetuating this ignorance. Once upon a time this was a mainstream opinion, and I can reluctantly excuse adoptive parents from that era who kept and keep their children in the dark. But to do this now after all the evidence of the past decades is morally repugnant. It turns a secret into a lie. I think back to all the times doctors have asked me "is there a family history of X?" and imagine that instead of answering "I don't know" that I had in ignorance given the the response "No", which might be wrong.
Would it ever have made a difference? Maybe and maybe not. But nobody, adoptive parent or social worker, could ever know in advance whether it would or not. If I could criminalize the act of not telling adopted kids they are adopted I would, because it is dangerous, irresponsible, hurtful, and terribly selfish.
I am very glad this letter-writer didn't get his wish and I fervently hope his children will one day learn some truths about themselves, because they deserve to know. I also hope that when this bubble of deception bursts as it probably will, the family is not too much hurt by it.
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