State Sen. Walter “Skip” Campbell, D-Tamarac, who sponsored the bill, claimed at the time of its introduction that the measure solidified the state’s constitutional obligation to biological fathers. “In 1972 the Supreme Court of the U.S. revolutionized the area of adoption law by saying that biological fathers have due-process rights so that they can have an opportunity to parent,” he said, citing the ruling in Stanley vs. Illinois that gave an unwed man rights to his biological children after their mother’s death.

But since its passage, the Florida law has managed to infuriate and alienate a wide and unlikely collection of state and national critics — including some fathers’ groups. Florida adoption professionals are alarmed by both the financial burden and public shame that their clients are forced to bear under the new rule. Antiabortion advocates — even the Rev. Jerry Falwell — worry that the law is steering women with unwanted pregnancies toward abortion rather than adoption. And the ACLU and NOW call the measure sexist, unconstitutional and a violation of privacy rights.

Representing six clients, including a 12-year-old rape victim, adoption lawyer Charlotte Danciu has challenged the law in Palm Beach County Circuit Court. Circuit Judge Peter Blanc declared the notification requirement unconstitutional in cases of rape, which was a victory for Danciu’s 12-year-old client. But Blanc upheld other provisions of the law, including the notification requirement for underage girls who willingly had sex; Danciu plans to appeal.

Meanwhile, local publicity about the case has triggered a furious debate: How do adoption officials, public or private, make sure that a biological parent has an opportunity to claim a child, without violating the privacy of either parent, or, for that matter, the child?

With between 5,000 to 7,000 annually, Florida has the second-highest number of adoptions in America, just behind California. Adoption professionals attribute these numbers, at least in part, to laws that make it relatively easy to adopt both privately and from the state. This was the case, at least, until last October, when the Florida Legislature overhauled its adoption statute to improve paternal rights.

Federal law requires that before a mother can give a child up for private or public adoption without the father’s permission, she must prove that she or her lawyer has performed an exhaustive search to locate the child’s father. The requirement is designed to prevent situations in which the father demands custody after learning about the existence of the child much later in the child’s life. In the last decade, such situations have resulted in high-profile lawsuits, and men’s rights groups have made the issue a priority. For that reason, social workers, adoption professionals, men’s groups and legislators in Florida wanted to clarify the process.

For most the 1990s, Florida adoption professionals proposed to solve the problem with a statewide paternity registry that would allow men to register their claims on any child that might be theirs. The registry was supposed to prevent pregnant women from giving away a child without the father’s knowledge. Authorities would check the registry before going through with adoption, looking for a potential biological father with an interest in the baby. More than a decade ago, as Florida considered creating a registry, the concept was new and only a few states had them. Today, nearly half the states in the country have registries.

Attorney Danciu decided to help write a bill proposing a Florida paternity registry after defending the adoptive parents of controversial “Baby Emily,” a Florida child whose biological father, a convicted rapist, had claimed — long after the adoption — that he wanted the child, despite the fact that he had failed to show up at early court hearings about the adoption. The court eventually granted custody of the child to her adoptive parents.

The measure didn’t receive much support from Florida’s conservative state government, despite lobbying from the state’s adoption community. Some male senators laughed and called it a “sex registry,” recalls Danciu. Others were concerned about confidentiality in a state where all public records are open to the public unless they are awarded a special exemption. What if a man had an extramarital affair, registered it, and his wife somehow saw it? wondered the lawmakers. “Lists can be dangerous,” state Sen. John McKay told the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel at the time.

Recalls state Sen. Debby Sanderson, “When we were talking about a paternity registry, one senator said ‘That could wreck a married man’s life.’”

The bill died, but legislators, still concerned about paternal rights and cases like that of Baby Emily, came up with what they thought was a better idea. Instead of forcing men to disclose messy details of their lives in order to have a say in a baby’s future, the mothers would have to publicly advertise their sexual histories in newspapers to give the men a chance to identify themselves — or not. This alternative plan, which became part of the new adoption statute, became law in October 2001: The 106-page statute was pushed through the system in just two days. Only eight senators voted against it.

The notice provision requires that women who cannot identify the fathers of children up for private adoption take out ads that list their names, addresses and physical description, along with the names of all of the men they had sex with during the 12 months before the baby was born. The ads have to run once a week for four weeks in all the cities where the baby could have been conceived. If a woman had sex with 20 men in 20 cities, she is required to buy newspaper ads in all of them.

Although there is no official count, adoption professionals guess that the law has affected hundreds of mothers since it was signed into law. Jeanne Tate, an adoption lawyer and executive vice president of the Florida Association of Adoption Professionals, says that during one recent week she helped 10 of her clients place ads; since October, her office has placed 50. Her guess is that hundreds of ads have been run in the last 10 months.

The cost for the ads can be prohibitive: One ad might cost a few hundred dollars, but a sexually active woman who has moved around a lot could end up paying thousands of dollars. (The legislators made exemptions for state adoptions so that the state wouldn’t have to pay the cost of the ads; only those who choose private adoption are forced to take out ads).

But the humiliation and potential danger inherent in publicly announcing sexual encounters with vanished or forgotten partners is far more debilitating than the cost of the ads. Melissa, a pregnant 18-year-old student, is now required to publish a notice in a Bronx newspaper about her one-night stand with a man she barely remembers.

“I’m disgusted,” she says. “I don’t feel that I should have to put my sexual history in a public newspaper. It’s embarrassing enough that I made a mistake and have to do this. I’m going to college and don’t want anyone to know. I’m [giving up the baby] to change my life. But this makes me feel ashamed.”

Nancy, a 41-year-old Palm Beach County mother, says she was impregnated by a violent boyfriend who subsequently locked her out of her home and disappeared when it came time to sign any paperwork for the adoption. Fortunately, she gave birth before the new law went into effect: Without paternal permission, she would have had to put ads in the papers.

“Given his past behavior, if I had published his name in the paper for everyone else to see, it could have triggered something unpleasant. I would have had to hide from him,” she says. She also had concealed the pregnancy from her family: “A newspaper record of this would have estranged me from my family. It’s a huge invasion of privacy.”

The consensus among adoption professionals is that the law has already had a chilling effect. Many birth mothers already have agreed to take out the ads, but others are deciding that it’s too much, and are choosing to forgo adoption altogether. Danciu estimates that she’s lost 15 clients who came in to arrange adoptions but left when they realized the burdens involved. Instead, she says, fearful mothers are either choosing to keep the child or have an abortion.

It’s this alienation from private adoption that has led local antiabortion organizations to line up against the law — despite the fact that the Florida Catholic Conference was initially one of its biggest proponents. Charlene Hubbard, adoption coordinator at the pro-life Brandon Care Pregnancy Center, says that the number of women who come to the center and agree to put their children up for adoption has dropped more than 25 percent this year. “Once they realize what the laws are and the hoops they have to jump through, then it’s too much trouble,” she says. “It’s a whole lot easier to go to the corner and have an abortion.”

Even the Rev. Falwell agrees: “This is a bad law,” Falwell said recently on “Hardball.” “This will encourage abortion rather than adoption.”

Forcing women with unwanted pregnancies to keep their babies very often is a devastating — or dangerous — alternative, say some critics of the law. Hubbard recently watched with concern as two mothers in her center made that choice, even though they clearly weren’t ready to be parents. “The birth fathers caused an issue and the girls did not want to go through all that hassle,” Hubbard says. “They chose to parent because they knew it would be a battle. That’s not always the best decision.”

The fear that motivated the law — that pregnant women would hide babies from their biological fathers — is unfounded, say adoption officials. It rarely, if ever, happens. “It always concerned us if we’d do an adoption and the father came back later,” says Danciu. “In 18 years only two fathers have ever come forward because they didn’t know the woman was pregnant, but both of them ultimately agreed to the adoption. And I’ve done over 2,000 adoptions.

“A lot of times the pregnancy is a mistake, a lot of times it’s an assault, and sometimes they financially just can’t do it,” she continues. “But it’s not because they are trying to hide a baby from the father: If he was there and offering financial support, they’d be having it.”

As an example, Danciu points to the six clients she represents in her lawsuit challenging the statute. Aside from the 12-year-old rape victim, there is a troubled 14-year-old girl who had sex with a number of her classmates. Another woman, a mother in good standing in her community, was slipped the date-rape drug Rohypnol and assaulted by three men; two other women were substance abusers. These weren’t exactly women who had been impregnated by responsible fathers; and yet they would still have to recount the mortifying facts of their sexual encounters in public papers — for their classmates, communities, families and strangers to peruse.

Another purpose of the Florida law is to protect fathers’ rights to their biological children, an issue that has dominated the agenda of many men’s rights groups. Earlier this month, these groups were up in arms about the case of a Pennsylvania woman who wanted to terminate a pregnancy against her ex-boyfriend’s wishes. The boyfriend initially received a preliminary injunction preventing the abortion, but it was later overturned by a higher court.

“[A man] has a large personal stake in a decision in which he is not allowed to take any part,” objected Dianna Thompson, executive director of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, in Newsday. “His wishes are irrelevant. When it comes to reproduction, in America today women have rights and men merely have responsibilities.”

But if the Florida adoption statute was intended to protect men’s rights, it’s had an unintended effect: The men get the short end of the stick, too. After all, the notices can list, by name, the men involved in the sexual encounters described, even if there is no real evidence that they impregnated the woman who took out the ad. As Melissa observes: “What if they are not the father, and they have that information in the paper? It’s not discreet by any means.”

And even if a man was interested in locating an elusive mate in order to retrieve his baby, an ad in a city paper many months or years later seems a rather clumsy route to finding her. People move all the time, after all; or simply don’t read the papers.

Still, some fathers’ groups shrug at the Florida law, saying that if a birth mother has to suffer public humiliation in order to find a biological father, well, that’s just too bad. “Why not? Are we saying we’re not responsible for our actions and our shame should cover up anything we did wrong, to the detriment of the child and father? Are we saying she has no responsibility for her own actions?” asks Lawrence Hellmann, president of the National Congress for Fathers and Children.

Biological fathers do, of course, have the right to be notified; everyone seems to agree that efforts should be made to find them. But, as Jeanne Tate puts it, “There are many, many ways to give notice to the birth father which don’t include such an invasion of the mother’s privacy rights.”

An alternative way to locate a birth father is the paternity registry. Now that so many states have them, even President Bush has advocated them; and U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., is currently drafting a bill that would, if passed by Congress this September, create a national paternity registry.

“We’ve been working on this for quite a few months,” says Lindsay Ellenbogen, a spokesperson for Sen. Landrieu. “It’s not in response to what’s going on in Florida, but it’s a good example of why this is needed … It’s all confidential, whereas in Florida that’s hardly the case.”

But the paternity registry is flawed, too: Is it realistic to expect that a man who wants a child will go sign a registry every time he has sex? Not surprisingly, some men’s rights groups don’t support this system either. “Paternity registries are kind of ‘Brave New World, 1984′: They are inhumane,” says Fred Hayward, executive director of Men’s Rights Inc. “So, it’s his obligation to go down and register himself as a potential father and if he fails to do that he only has responsibilities, no rights? That’s ridiculous. It’s demanding a standard of behavior of potential male parents just a hundred times higher than what we demand of female parents.”

So what is the best way to locate unaware or elusive biological fathers? Hellmann proposes an extreme option: Punish the mother if she doesn’t seem forthcoming. “It is a woman’s obligation when she gets pregnant to do everything she can to identify the father. If a mother shows she’s not interested in doing that, take the child away from her until she is.” Clearly, this is not an alternative likely to receive support from women, their advocates or constitutional lawyers.

Meanwhile, Florida legislators, chastened by negative publicity from the lawsuit, are already talking about revising the notice requirement — perhaps eliminating some of the personal details that women are asked to disclose, or striking the law altogether. Even Sen. Campbell is now agreeing that the legislation is flawed. “We gotta fix it,” he agrees.

“I imagine that now that this has hit the light of day there will be some changes made by the Legislature; it should be the case. Otherwise we might as well just bring back the stocks and public flogging,” says Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women. “It seems almost pointless to say what an outrage it is.”

But even if the Florida furor results in the elimination of the law, it does not solve the conflict inherent in the search for biological fathers and the preservation of the right to privacy — for both parents and the child. As Fred Hawyard puts it, “The ads are a terrible solution. But not doing anything is an even worse solution.”

Charlotte Danciu, for one, hopes that the debacle in Florida will raise an issue that appears to have been forgotten in the heat of battle — the well-being of unwanted children. “It’s time that we stopped being so concerned about the biological parents’ rights, and instead thought about the rights of the kids they bring into the world.”

“We want more pretzels!” they cry out to their counselor.

Last year, 19,237 children were adopted from foreign countries and brought to the United States — nearly triple the number of foreign adoptions just 10 years ago. Babies brought to the States from abroad — many of them from Southeast Asia, Latin America, Russia and India — now total nearly 15 percent of all adoptions in this country. Foreign adoption has become enough a part of American life to be the subject of at least one heartwarming advertisement for digital cameras (a couple in an airplane pose with their Asian baby). Tabloids and glossies regularly feature the stories of celebrities who have “imported” infants for adoption.

But as common as they have become, these adoptions are still controversial. The trend still rankles some Americans and raises questions for others, including those who study the growing phenomenon.

Why adopt foreign children when there are so many children awaiting adoption in the United States? Is it a good idea to take a child from her native country? Can an “ethnic” child be raised by white parents without becoming emotionally mired in issues related to their differences? How, for instance, does a white parent help a child of color deal with racism? These questions don’t just come from those who observe the trend of foreign adoption with detached interest; they are typical of adopting families who find themselves raising kids from other countries in communities that are not prepared to deal with them — the parents or the children.

So compelling — and troubling — are the issues related to foreign adoption, that an entire cottage industry has emerged to guide families through the process, providing advice during the adoption phase and help — for parents and, eventually, the children — thereafter. There are adoption therapists and genetic counselors who will “pre-screen” potential adoptees; there are local support groups for parents and kids; there is a flotilla of self-help books, Web sites and magazines; and there are companies that offer families guided trips back to the countries where their children were born.

Then there are the heritage camps.

Heritage camps are an early, and now pervasive, by-product of the international adoption phenomenon. Every summer, across the country, families with adopted kids converge on dozens of camps like Colorado’s East Indian Heritage Camp, for an education in the culture, crafts and ceremonies of their “indigenous” countries. The Colorado Heritage Camp company alone offers camps for kids from Korea, Russia, the Philippines, Latin America, Vietnam, China and East India, as well as, incongruously, an African-American camp. In activity-filled weekend workshops, organizers say their goal is to give adopted kids a way to reclaim a lost, forgotten or maligned ethnic heritage, while providing a community of peers to get in touch with and discuss issues of racism and acceptance.

But the annual East Indian Heritage Camp weekend demonstrates a curious disconnect between the goals of its organizers and the needs of the campers. The pretzel-munching third-graders — along with all the other kids, age 3 through 17 who arrive here with their parents — come across as typical American kids whose “issues” have little to do with ethnic identity and more to do with predictable developmental hassles. The point of the camp is to deal with the kids’ differences, to address issues of identity and assimilation. Yet, in a lot of cases, the kids seem to have coped with, or not yet encountered, those problems. The young ones want pretzels; the older ones want to go home, be with their friends and hone their coolness.

It is tempting to conclude that the camps, rather than resolving existing concerns, are addressing imaginary dilemmas dreamed up by concerned, culturally conscious adults. For the kids, the cultural education is cursory, at best; most seem to enjoy the weekend — camp is camp, after all. Some experts argue that simply being around peers will have a positive long-term impact for adopted children, although no one has really proven that. Others warn that by emphasizing differences, the kids can become aware of, and be dogged by, concerns and fears that they didn’t have before camp. But for the parents, the benefits are clear. Heritage weekends provide relief and support to parents with adopted kids who feel isolated and vulnerable in communities where their families are different; and worried about the impact of differences between them and their adopted children.

As Samir Tailor, a 34-year-old Indian camp counselor, puts it: “It’s almost more about helping the parents than about helping the kids. Being from white America, they don’t have to go through these [race] issues, but the tables are turned here. For the parents it’s more educational, but for the kids it’s more social.”

Lunch on Saturday is a chunky Indian yoghurt soup, rice pilaf and spicey chutneys with turkey burgers; also on the menu is a meal of potato chips and hot dogs. The Indian children, almost without exception, head straight for the hot dogs. Their parents dutifully slurp the Indian soup.

“It smells funny,” says one little girl, wrinkling her nose, as her mom encourages her to try the soup.

“It does smell funny,” the mother agrees, but bravely downs a spoonful anyway.

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The first heritage camp was reportedly founded in the late 1970s by Holt International, a foreign adoption service, at the request of adult adoptee clients who felt they would have benefited from some cultural education as children. But it wasn’t until the 1990s, as foreign adoption exploded, that the heritage camp phenomenon really caught on.

Today, there are dozens of camps tailored for children from a number of countries, although a majority are for Asian or, specifically, Korean children (almost 10 percent of all foreign adoptees are from South Korea). Most camps, like Colorado Heritage Camps, are coordinated by groups of adoptive parents; others, like Holt Heritage Camps, are set up by adoption centers for the families that have used their services. Camps range from short day camps to weeklong sleepover camps; some invite the adopted children only, while others are for the entire family. The curriculum is typically the same for all the camps: a mix of ethnic crafts, dancing, sports, cooking, perhaps a dash of history or language, and a number of discussion groups where kids or parents talk about identity, heritage or adoption issues.

Colorado Heritage Camps, one of the most comprehensive heritage camp companies, runs eight camps every summer. Although the camp was initially founded 11 years ago by a group of parents of Korean children, Pam Sweetzer and her husband Dan — themselves the adoptive parents of two children, from Korea and East India — took over the organization nine years ago and have since expanded to cover an ever-growing range of ethnicities, from Russian to Chinese. Next year, they’ll add a Cambodian camp to the list as a response to the requests of the parents who have attended (many of whom have multiple adopted children from different countries). “They just keep spawning these other camps!” laughs Pam Sweetzer, a friendly blond woman in her 40s.

Sweetzer runs the organization as a nonprofit, and the camps are heavily staffed by volunteers, who include adoptive parents, who help coordinate events, and local ethnic community members, who offer cultural expertise for the workshops and serve as camp counselors for the kids. Every summer, more than 900 adopted children and their parents participate in the camps, along with roughly 1,000 counselors and volunteers.

This year at East Indian Heritage Camp, for example, dozens of volunteers from the Denver-area Indian community have arrived to teach the kids yoga and Indian dancing, mehndi ceremonial tattoos, cricket, cooking, storytelling and Indian cinema. Parents attend cultural workshops like “Indian Caste System” and “Indian Wedding,” as well as group roundtables discussing subjects ranging from attachment issues and adoption advice, to racism and identity issues. Some 165 children are attending this year; almost all of these children are adopted (a small number are their siblings).

East Indian Heritage Camp often seems like a lesson in multicultural political correctness. Parental enthusiasm for slurping Indian soup or learning about the caste system frequently outweighs the enthusiasm of the kids for the same things; perhaps because the parents are already biased toward a cultural education. “The families often wind up embracing the cultural activities more strongly than the kids do: often, they’ve made the decision to adopt from [a foreign country] because they are drawn to that culture, and they want to pass their enthusiasm on to their kids,” says Dr. Dana Johnson, director of the International Adoption Clinic at the University of Minnesota. “But it’s like anything that parents are enthusiastic about: Sometimes the kids embrace it as well, at other times it’s like ‘We have had enough of this stuff.’”

Running through the adult enthusiasm for all things foreign, however, is their concern that their kids might not think that being Indian is cool; that they’d be embarrassed about their place of birth or, worse, resentful. Since the parents themselves usually aren’t Indian, they feel like the next-best place to teach those kids how to feel proud is at a heritage camp. (“Homeland tours,” organized to take families with adopted families back to the country of birth, are another fast-growing response to this need.)

Gregory Keck, an adoption therapist and director of the Attachment and Bonding Center of Ohio, says that heritage camp can serve as “compensation” on the part of white parents who worry they’ve somehow done their kids wrong simply by adopting them. “There’s this idea that we are taking kids away from their culture, and that you can do a number of things to help the child retain their culture, but I don’t think you can,” says Keck. “The fact is that when you leave a culture you are born into and come to America, you grow up as an American kid.”

The parents, for their part, do seem to recognize that their kids are fully American (and Americanized); but they see the camp as an opportunity for their kids to be All-American and Indian — superkids, essentially, schooled in two cultures. Nelly Gupta, a Westchester mother from Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., has come to East Indian Heritage Camp with her Indian-American husband Rishi and their adopted 8-year-old daughter Kiran. Gupta brought her child, she says, because she thought she was “old enough to understand” her heritage.

Gupta says she cried when her daughter carried an Indian flag up to the podium during the opening ceremonies. “I teared up that she might be able to claim, or reclaim, a piece of her identity and heritage,” Gupta exclaims. “She’s an all-American kid. But it’s so important that kids from a third world country feel pride in their heritage — it’s not a Third World hellhole, but a culture that is rich and diverse in its own right. It’s empowering.”

In the afternoon, a group of second-graders are getting a lesson in yoga from a pretty blond instructor, who reads them a story — “How Ganesh Got his Elephant Head” — before leading them through yoga exercises — downward facing dog, standing tall trees. “Do you know what yoga is?” she asks them. “It’s Indian,” offers one little girl, helpfully. “It’s a way to relax your body,” says another.

The kids sit cross-legged, press their palms together and dutifully repeat the “ommm” of their teacher. “Feel the vibrations going through your body,” she says with eyes closed and a placid smile on her face. The children obediently follow her directions, as she explains to them: “Yoga unites your mind and your body!”

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Heritage camps, as long as they take place in the U.S. and last for a week or a weekend, cannot provide an experience that could be called cultural immersion. At East Indian camp, kids rush from class to class every hour, getting brief instruction in a number of subjects that few of them will ever use at home. A child will learn a few yoga poses, but is unlikely to get a historical background of traditional Indian practice. And while the younger children seem to absorb some of the basic ideas — it’s Indian, it relaxes your body — there is little guidance on what it all means.

This doesn’t mean that the kids don’t seem to enjoy what they are doing. The little kids especially tend to throw themselves into the crafts, dancing classes and games. One of the most popular events of the weekend for the small children is what is billed as the Holi Festival; in India, this is the “festival of colors” which welcomes the spring, during which celebrants fling colored powder and water on each other as a celebration of life’s “brightness.” At East Indian Heritage Camp, the kids are simply ushered to a soccer field, where they are handed squirt bottles filled with tempera paint and encouraged to make a total mess.

No one has bothered to tell them what the festival symbolizes — it’s too hard to coordinate, I’m told, since the kids often arrive at the field at different times — but the kids don’t really seem to care. They simply grab the squirt bottles and go wild, until everyone on the field is screaming with laughter and covered from head to sneakered foot in brilliant blobs of paint.

The teens, however, are a different story. Many have been attending for years (a majority of camp attendees are repeat visits). And although they are given the most lenience in their schedules, and attend advanced classes with more cultural context — Indian cooking, cricket, music lessons, history discussions — they can be indifferent, if not resentful, about the whole package.

One afternoon, in a stuffy cabin far from the central gymnasium, teens are being taught how to make rose punch and raita, a dish of cucumbers and yogurt. Some girls cluster around the teacher, Purnima Voria, a dimpled woman in a sari and bindi who talks a little like Martha Stewart with an accent. “Cooking is an art,” she says, carefully arranging peppers on the top of the dish. “Don’t be afraid to take it a little further.” The teenage boys slump in chairs as far away from the table as possible, with the exception of a few boys who seem to be mostly enjoying their close proximity to the girls.

The real activity is outside the cabin, where a group of girls in tight jeans and belly-baring tops — they’ve chosen not to don the required camp T-shirt — sit and flirt with boys in skate shorts and basketball jerseys. Jared Juy, a kinetic 14-year-old who does proudly wear his camp T-shirt, shows an ebullient enthusiasm for the camp in general; but he doesn’t seem to care much for the cultural classes. Mostly the camp is a way to meet girls. “I’ve gone every year since this camp started. It’s great, I get to see all my friends, and girls,” he says, as he wraps his arms around a pretty friend. “The best thing here is freedom from your parents.”

His companion, 16-year-old first-time attendee Tasha Condie from Utah, is less overtly enthusiastic about the weekend; her parents have brought her here at a friend’s recommendation, and although she says she’s having an “OK time,” she would rather socialize than learn how to cook or play cricket. “We need to party,” she explains, “… and they need to bring a TV.”

“They’ll show movies later,” Jared points out.

Tasha rolls her eyes: “Yeah, Indian movies, to be exact.”

At one point, toward the end of the weekend, one of the volunteer camp coordinators has clearly reached her limit with the teens’ apparent boredom. She pulls the teens into a room and begs them to tell her what they would want to do in future years. More culture classes? Language classes? Nothing at all?

One girl suggests Hindi classes; another wants to learn ancient Indian history. But most teens simply nod in agreement with the sentiments of one boy who blurts out: “Let us choose what we want to do, and let us just hang out if we don’t want to do anything.”

Heritage camps are caught in a bind: What they really need to teach is not what it is to be Indian, but what it is to be Indian-American, which can be different for each child, depending on countless factors. The hope is that the kids will go home armed with cultural knowledge that they’ll use to shape their own Indian-American identities. As Susan Soon-keum Cox, vice president of public policy for Holt International heritage camps, posits, “It helps them to understand where they fit in the world: Are they Korean-American or American-Korean? Which goes first? They need to be able to find that balance … go away proud of the fact that they are part of two cultures and identities.”

Identity, however, isn’t acquired through cooking classes alone. So while the culture classes — the sports, the dancing, the games and crafts — are a colorful lure that brings families to Colorado, it’s the discussion groups and socializing with peers that are ultimately the focus of the weekend. Essentially, it’s a support group, candy-coated with Indian cooking and ethnic crafts.

Admits Pam Sweetzer: “The culture stuff is mostly a reason to get them here to meet each other.”

Sweetzer, like a lot of the parents here, is most concerned with making sure that adopted kids “fit in” in the world. And the parents have reason to be concerned: Most families at East Indian Camp seem to come from small, Midwestern communities where there are very few Indian families (or any minorities, for that matter), much less families with white parents and Indian children. They worry, understandably, that their kids will grow up feeling alienated or rejected by white kids, and possibly misunderstood by adults, including their parents.

“For parents who adopt foreign children, it’s a two-way street: You get tsk-tsk faces from older white women, but also all the people of color come up and tell you what a beautiful baby you have,” says Dr. Johnson. “We live in a racist society, and when we think of what our children will face none of us want our kids to face things that will be hurtful; every parent of a child of color is going to be concerned about racial bias. It doesn’t happen very often, so it’s not that pervasive, but those people do exist in society, and nothing is ever going to take that away.”

At East Indian Heritage camp, it’s normal to have an ethnically mixed family; it’s normal to have dark skin. Wanda and Peter Bonnel, a friendly couple from Topeka, Kansas, have been coming to East Indian Heritage Camp for eight years. Their children — a daughter, age 13, and a son, 15 — were both adopted from India. “Only three families in Topeka have adopted Indian kids, so our kids know they are different,” says Peter Bonnel, as he and his wife sit outside sipping beers on Friday night. The kids are roasting marshmallows; the whole family has just attended a concert of classical Indian sitar music. “This camp allows them to be a majority instead of a minority.”

“This is the only place in the world where we are considered a normal family,” agrees his wife, Wanda. “We keep coming to camp to show them it’s OK, there are other families like this. It gets harder [for them to be Indian] the older they get, because they just want to fit in.”

Dr. Johnson points out that it’s important for kids who are adopted from foreign countries to spend time with others of the same ethnicity as they are growing up. Even if they “feel” white and are accepted within their community, at some point — usually once they leave their families for college — they will realize that are identified as “different” from white kids by virtue of their skin color; at the same time, they may not be accepted by other people of color, either, because they are too “white.”

“Kids need to get together with other kids that look like them and respect that, so that when they look in the mirror and see someone from Korea or China or India they think that’s OK,” Johnson says. “The more they can get together with other kids who look like them and have had that experience, the better off they are.”

The kids at East Indian Heritage Camp seem to support Johnson’s thesis; most express a quiet comfort at simply being around other kids who look like them, even if they aren’t eloquently expressive about the race issues at hand. As Tasha Condie puts it, “I feel really comfortable. It’s cool being around all these other Indian kids who are adopted.” Or Chandre Murrell, age 12: “In my school there’s only one other person who is Indian. So coming here is fun.” Her friend, Alysia Larson: “I don’t feel different here; I’m just like everyone else.”

Nineteen-year-old Jancy Turner, a camp counselor who was, until recently, an attendee, says that when she began coming to camp as a 14-year-old, meeting all the other Indian kids was like an epiphany. “Where I grew up, I was the only person with dark skin. I never knew any Indian families, and I didn’t know anyone who looked like me. And then I came here, and everyone looked like me,” she says. “I felt so accepted and right at home — I didn’t have to worry what people thought.”

The parents, struggling with their own issues — chief among them, unfamiliarity with racism — sit in roundtable discussions and worry about how to deal with potential harassment. In one roundtable, parents peppered a group of young Indian men about how their kids would be treated in school. The panelists warned parents that their kids would probably face epithets like “Sand-nigger” or “Camel-jockey.” The parents, in turn, betrayed a feeling of futility as they quizzed the panelists about ways to help their kids cope with such epithets.

“I didn’t necessarily do [my kids] any favors by pulling them out of their culture, bringing them into mine, and expecting them to be peachy keen,” says Sweetzer. “I can listen and understand and feel sad, angry [when they have hard times with other kids], but I can’t really relate to being a minority; I don’t know what they go through. And like anything your kid goes through, you can’t fix it all and you feel helpless.”

At this level, the camps often feel like a place to exorcise white guilt. Parents are aware that their kids might face racism and won’t really be able to fall back on their families for help. The parents, convinced they won’t be able to relate to the pain of prejudice, want at least to expose kids to their heritage as a way to bolster pride and give them strength in their daily trials.

This is the primary goal of one of Colorado Heritage Camp’s more controversial workshops — African-American camp, for white families that have adopted black kids. Unlike the other camps, this one doesn’t really teach much about Africa, since most of the kids were adopted from agencies in American inner cities. Instead, the camp teaches African-American history — soul food cooking, civil rights history, freedom songs — in the hopes of giving black kids and their parents an education in race and the social injustices that children of color in America have endured over time.

Discussions about racism often take place, at least at the Colorado Heritage Camps, in “HeART Talks” designed for individual age groups. Kids take part in roundtable discussions in which they are encouraged to bring up skin color and feelings of difference. The talks are closed to reporters, but camp coordinators say that they can be emotionally cathartic for the participants. Twenty-one-year-old counselor Priya Kumar recalls a teenage girl from a previous year who refused to wear the camp T-shirt or participate in activities. She wore heavy pancake makeup and eye shadow. When she was encouraged to open up in one of the HeART Talks, says Kumar, the girl broke down and said that she had been beaten at school because she wasn’t white: She wore the makeup to hide the bruises.

But not all the kids at camp want to belabor the ways that they feel different; in fact, some kids seem to feel like the camp is forcing race issues down their throat. Abby, a fourth-grader who says she likes coming to camp because she gets to “make friends,” was quite clear about her least favorite part of the weekend: The HeART talks. “Last year some mean woman asked me if I felt dumb because I had brown skin,” she complains. “It hurt my feelings.”

There’s a danger, says therapist Keck, that a kid dragged to a heritage camp and forced to talk about ethnicity will just feel more alienated. By reinforcing differences, kids are made more aware of them. “If the kids don’t want to go, but people say they need to go because they’re adopted and Korean or Indian, most of those kids will wonder they can’t just grow up and go to soccer camp,” says Keck. “These kids do have issues with race, but I often think that [with adults] the race issue takes on a life of its own that is sometimes larger than it needs to be.”

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It’s difficult to determine exactly how heritage camps affect an adopted child’s sense of self and identity, because there are so many different iterations on display. There are little kids who can’t wait to put on their Indian dresses for the final night’s “Spice of Life” dance festival; who prattle on about all things Indian and say they love to come every year. There also are kids who refuse to wear Indian clothes; who sulk on the edge of classes instead of participating; or who are far more interested in flirting with boys than talking about their countries of origin.

“In the world of adoption there are kids who are completely attracted to heritage camps, and others who have no interest — just as I didn’t have much interest in going to my own family’s reunions,” points out Keck. “People have to be careful not to think that heritage camps do more than they do. Unfortunately it’s gotten a bit trendy to have an adopted child and want to send them off to camp, even if they don’t want to go.”

Furthermore, Keck points out that there are many phases in an adopted child’s emotional development — particularly when it comes to skin color and ethnicity. Some younger children, he says, often just want to identify with their white parents, and he has heard stories of kids who sat in their bathrooms trying to “scrub the dark away to become lighter.” But, he says, “most kids end up knowing they are a different race; and then in adolescence there is a new resurgence in identity-seeking.” Other kids, he says, will grow up without ever displaying interest in their heritage or skin color.

One visible benefit of East Indian Heritage Camp is that many of the younger children seem to have soaked up some idea that that it is OK to be Indian, that they don’t need to scrub their skin color away. If anything, they’ve gone to the other extreme: “You talk to the little ones, and ask them where they are from, and they say India, not Colorado,” says Kumar. “They know they are special. They have a sense of heritage, and where they come from.”

The hope of parents is that once the kids happily accept their Indian heritage, life might get easier. Karen Baughn of Glendale, Arizona, the mother of 16-year-old Komal (as well as six other adopted children, from a variety of countries), says confidently that heritage camps have helped her daughter’s self-esteem about being Indian. “Since we started coming to camp, being Indian doesn’t bother her anymore,” says Baughn. “She hasn’t had any identity issues, she fits right in, even though she’s the only East Indian at her high school.”

But despite her mother’s assertions, it’s clear why Komal fits in so well at school: She’s a beautiful teenage girl, trendy and cool in her crop-tops and jeans. When Wanda Bonnel shares a story about how her daughter went through an “Indian phase” in fourth grade, wearing Indian clothes to school every day, Baughn looks up in shock. “My daughter wouldn’t be caught dead in Indian clothes,” she says. “She wants to look just like everyone else.”

And that, of course, is the crux of the issue at heritage camp. The kids, raised like typical American kids, want to fit in with other kids at their schools. But fitting in sometimes has less to do with skin color and more to do with simply being just like everyone else in your class: dressing right, looking pretty, saying the right things, listening to the right music. And while there are certainly kids at camp who will have serious identity issues or problems with racism, and whom these heritage camps could help, many of the older kids like Komal seem already to have done a fine job of assimilating despite their parents’ concerns.

After all, the hope of “fitting in” and “being just like everyone else” is exactly what parents can never truly promise, regardless of whether their kids are adopted. Sure, bringing kids to heritage camp could bolster their confidence, give them new avenues of self-exploration and a better awareness of what their skin color means; it also clearly reassures parents that they’ve used every resource available to families in their situation.

As Dr. Johnson puts it, “I can’t really think of a downside of a culture camp.” But whether three days at a heritage camp can change the quality of the other 362 days of the year is impossible to know.

It’s bad, this Vin thing. An otherwise reasonable friend of mine — the erudite director of a nonprofit, not typically prone to bouts of teenage swoon — recently told me that she had the hots for Diesel. “He’s just a raw hunk of a man,” she said, a mild expression of embarrassment flickering across her face. “You know: Pull my hair and make love to me!”

Yes, but the culture is full of manly hunks. So how else to explain Diesel’s overpowering magnetism? Entertainment Weekly, which — along with nearly every other magazine on the planet — plastered him on its cover last week, under the headline “The Fast and Furious Rise of Vin Diesel,” has posited that he is essentially a capable body that dropped out of the sky at the right moment. One agent pointed out that Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Willis are too old, and that Diesel just fell into place.

Certainly, this is true: For years, the screen has been empty of compelling ass-kicking action heroes. Hollywood has attempted to pass off a number of utterly unconvincing pretty boy actors as two-fisted idols — Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Keanu Reeves (except for “The Matrix” Keanu) — who were too self-involved with their own moral and intellectual torments to truly be heroes. The Rock, the only other traditional action star to debut in the last few years (by way of the WWF and “Scorpion King”) simply bulged his way through his film.

But Vin Diesel has taken the best of traditional action heroism — the watermelon muscles, the lumpen voice, the stoic ambivalence to pain of all kinds — and given it a contemporary dose of irony. In a way, he’s the perfect 21st century hero: a bad guy who’s really a good guy, who isn’t necessarily Wittgenstein but is certainly smarter than he looks. Not pretty, but not too beefy either: Just a dose of testosterone with a heart of gold (once you dig down) and biceps of steel, with enough self-consciousness about the campiness of the whole endeavor to make cheesy action flicks entertaining again. He makes it possible to find him absurd and irresistible at the same time.

There are other obvious reasons for the Vin Diesel swoon. First, there’s the delightful name — reminiscent of greasy motorcycles and the Italian mafia — which is simply too good to be true (it isn’t). Then there’s the unforgettable profile: both his body, enormous without being muscle-bound à la Stallone or Schwarzenegger; and his head, with that bulbous bumpy bald pate, an oversized noggin that goes on forever. Finally, there’s the voice; a slow, bemused growl, a low-rent bedroom baritone.

For the women who confess to loving him, Vin Diesel exudes an odd sort of sexual charisma. No woman I know would actually call him good-looking, but several confessed to melting over his softer-edged version of beefy masculinity. This is a man, after all, who shows up in his latest film wearing a fur coat, a fashion statement that is at once openly effeminate and self-consciously masculine (only a man confident enough with his own testosterone levels would don a fur).

“He was a New York bouncer,” one friend tells me, as if that explains everything, and in a way it does: the fashion sense, the cocky attitude, the muscles. “You have to admire him for making it so big.”

My male friends, on the other hand, tend to roll their eyes and groan when I beg them for their opinions, offended that I would waste my time admiring a hokey action star. My male friends are, it should be said, mostly sensitive film geeks unimpressed by another man’s biceps; but judging by box office receipts, they must be in the minority. “I can’t believe you’re writing about that doofus,” one said crossly, forcing me to cough with embarrassment and pretend I was just “curious about the Vin phenomenon.” “He can’t act!”

But while Vin Diesel is no Alec Guinness, whether he can really act is beside the point. Vin Diesel’s most prestigious films were also his smallest roles: in “Boiler Room” and “Saving Private Ryan,” he plays the gruffly good-humored Italian-American lug who doesn’t quite grasp what’s going on around him. In both films, there’s a suggestion that he’s actually an actor who might be able to do something with a fully developed role. But his subsequent rise to stardom has been propelled by schlock pics like “Pitch Black” and “The Fast and the Furious,” where his acting has consisted primarily of oozing a cool charisma; and in its own way, that alone is more than enough.

Both these films were, to put it mildly, mind-numbing and ridiculous. I loved both. Because of Vin Diesel.

In “Pitch Black,” he plays Riddick, a calmly confident convicted murderer who can see in the dark — the only hope for a group of hapless travelers stranded with hungry aliens on a planet of eternal night. In “The Fast and the Furious,” he’s Dominick Toretto, a calmly confident convicted felon who has a way with race cars — the only hope for a hapless detective who hopes to break a truck-jacking ring. His purpose in “Pitch Black” is mostly to lurk menacingly in corners, gaze stoically out into the lethal night and deliver groaner lines while he kills aliens with his bare hands (“He did not know who he was fuckin’ with”). In “The Fast and the Furious,” he calmy crashes cars at 170 miles an hour, pontificates about family values and delivers howlers like: “I live my life a quarter mile at a time.” Of course, in both films, he saves everyone’s asses and turns out to be a big softy.

In the preposterous “XXX,” a kind of James Bond thriller for the Playstation crowd, he once again plays “the best and brightest of the bottom of the barrel.” Xander Cage is a tattooed, husky underground action sports hero who likes to steal cars from senators who ban rap music; he is recruited as an expendable body by the NSA in order to infiltrate a band of anarchists who are planning the apocalypse when they aren’t busy having sex with strippers. Vin Diesel’s purpose in this movie, much as it was in “The Fast and the Furious” and “Pitch Black,” is to deliver teen-friendly one-liners like “Don’t be a dick, Dick” with a cocky expression on his face; to flex his tattoos and look macho as he jumps off the back of a motorcycle or snowboards out of an avalanche.

“XXX” is absurd — scene after implausible scene of direct rip-offs from spy thrillers and sports videos, complete with clichéd dialogue and one-dimensional bad guys. Sitting in the movie theater surrounded by the teenage boys this movie was made for (along with, not surprisingly, a large number of gay men), I felt ridiculous. But I loved the sheer spectacle, and Vin Diesel looked great — arresting even — in that fur coat and sly expression.

Diesel may be a straight-ahead action hero for the 15-year-old boys who flock to his movies; but for adults like myself, who prefer more thoughtful fare but every once in a while like to indulge in a slice of Hollywood cheese, he is ultimately a camp icon. The best action movies these days have a certain self-awareness about the silliness of their endeavors. In 1985, film critic Pauline Kael wrote that “a Sylvester Stallone hit movie has the same basic appeal as professional wrestling or demolition derbies: audiences hoot at it and get a little charged up at the same time.” The same could be said about Diesel oeuvre. But unlike “Rambo” or “Rocky,” which took themselves very seriously — Stallone’s protruding lower lip, his drooping scowl, were somehow supposed to conjure up American fortitude itself — films like “XXX” and “The Fast and the Furious” know exactly what they are: sexy schlock with big bangs, big boys and even bigger budgets. (To be fair, in “XXX” Xander Cage is also supposed to represent America, too; but a young, irreverent America that drives vintage GTOs and jumps from planes with stars-and-stripes ‘chutes).

Vin Diesel bears some resemblance to all three of the aforementioned holy trinity of contemporary action heroes — Willis, Schwarzenegger, Stallone — but personality-wise he’s closest to Willis (in his “Die Hard” days, as opposed to his “Sixth Sense” or “Story of Us” days). Willis had a brain underneath all that brawn, and delivered his punch lines with a wry arch of his eyebrows that made you believe that he thought action films were a ridiculous, if lucrative, lark. Like Willis, Diesel also seems to be having a fine old time in his films: He saunters through the scenes as if he were on a sightseeing tour of Paris. He rarely breaks out into a full grin, let alone a laugh (though he has a fine deep laugh), but there often is a smile just below the surface of even his silliest lines. Again like Willis, he’s in on the joke too.

When, in “XXX,” he is thrown out of a speeding airplane and dragged along a runway in a parachute, he brushes the dust off with a sly grin on his face: “I live for this shit,” he exclaims, just like an overgrown teenager. “Let’s do it again!” And you really do believe that he loves those kinds of silly stunts, both on-screen and off, simply because he knows how juvenile they are.

Or perhaps these are just the traits that I want to attribute to him, perhaps to make my own moviegoing a little more intellectually palatable. Unfortunately, Vin Diesel doesn’t seem to be a great ironist off-screen; by all accounts, he has taken his stardom very seriously, and very methodically manhandled his way into Hollywood. A Hollywood friend told me a second-hand but convincing story about Diesel’s arrival in town in the mid-1990s: Meeting with agents after his debut short film “Multi-Facial,” Diesel would confidently growl, “You better sign me up now, while you can afford me. I’m going to be a star.”

This is a man who demanded $30 million to be in the sequel to “The Fast and the Furious,” and refused to appear when the producers wouldn’t fork out (he said he had too many franchises already — “Riddick,” the follow-up to “Pitch Black,” and a sequel to “XXX”). Ballsy as it was, he probably deserved the money. “Fast and the Furious 2″ deserves to tank without him: Wussy little Paul Walker, with his curly blond hair and delicate features, was certainly not the reason that the original movie sold some $144 million worth of theater tickets.

But Diesel would be wise to save his cash while he can. He may never become a Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis — thoughtful action heroes who aged gracefully out of their wife-beater tank tops and into grown-up dramatic roles. But he seems to have a touch more depth, and a better sense of humor, than a Stallone or Schwarzenegger, who were ultimately useful to us only as icons of muscle-bound masculinity. If Vin Diesel turns out to have one shtick, and one shtick only, he will certainly fade from the screen as our idea of an action hero changes once again.

I get the sense that my girlfriends who adore Vin Diesel wouldn’t really know what to do with him if he showed up on their doorstep and actually begged to make love to them. Part of the fun of lusting after Diesel is the fact that it’s just so silly to do so. So perhaps what is ultimately so enjoyable about our latest action throb is that he seems to be so very much enjoying what he does: You just can’t help but get the sense that Vin Diesel’s favorite role is himself. And even if Diesel is almost 100 percent artifice — the name, the muscles, the sex appeal — it’s an illusion that goes down as easily as a pint of Cherry Garcia ice cream, with the same slight twinge of guilt.

And it works. At least as far as her stage show, “Rebel Without a Pause,” is concerned. With its debut in October, Reno became one of the first comedians to attempt to tease humor out of the events surrounding Sept. 11. She says she conceived the show — which is part memoir, part profane satire that dismantles just about every aspect of the political system — as a way to exorcise her emotions. Tidbits from the unrelenting commentary include her description of the emergency food drops in Afghanistan — “If the bombs don’t get them, the sugar will” — and an unforgiving take on George W. Bush’s public speaking style — “Like a drunk trying to look sober.”

The show, produced by friend and occasional costar Lily Tomlin, “dares to suggest the unsuggestable,” according to the New York Times. Other reviews have been equally positive, helping to create enough buzz and ticket sales for Reno to move to a larger theater on 42nd Street.

The 46-year-old Latina lesbian with radical political leanings wasn’t always a comedic politico. She’s done solo comedy shows in San Francisco and New York, as well as on cable TV, for almost two decades, and has built a cult following for her abrasively edgy sense of humor (Rolling Stone called her “the funny Madonna” in 1989). Her last film, “Reno Finds Her Mom,” which aired on HBO in 1998, was a satirical documentary about the search for her birth mother, who gave her up for adoption in 1956; a previous show, “Reno: In Rage and Rehab,” addressed her former crystal-meth habit.

Reno is the queen of wild tangents. Her brain zips around from subject to subject — perhaps because of her diagnosed ADD — and her train of thought offers an exhilarating ride even if you can’t always stay onboard. Her favorite subjects these days are the hypocritical troika of Bush, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft and what she believes to be the short-sighted nature of post-Sept. 11 hyper-patriotism.

During a brief break just before July 4, Reno strained her raspy voice to fire off opinions about flag-waving, the Pledge of Allegiance and the Department of Homeland Security. And what, exactly, did John Walker Lindh’s dad tell her?

I heard that John Walker Lindh’s father came backstage after a recent show in San Francisco, before his son was sentenced to 20 years. What did he say to you?

It was a brilliant moment, probably one of the highest moments I could think of. During the show I was talking about the brutality and overkill of the bullying conditions that so many people have signed on to, regular citizenry in the U.S. — Ari Fleischer condemning people who have the slightest question about anything the administration does, or Dick Cheney calling the Democratic leadership in December and asking them point-blank not to investigate the physical evidence of Sept. 11 …

And I was talking about the time when Bush Sr. came out of the woodwork screaming about John Walker, calling him “American Taliban” and saying he had a unique punishment for this kid. He said, “You know what we should do? Not let him wash his face or hands and make him walk across America and see how much love he gets!” He sounded just like an 8-year-old at a bus stop! I was talking about this, and then 45 minutes later, there’s a knock on my door and a man is hugging me with tears in his eyes … I was blown away.

I asked how they were treating his son. He said he can’t go outside at all, but the marshal and the agents in the FBI assigned to his case are apparently treating him like a human being and … they are accepting of John’s innocence. That is what it seems like — he was a hapless soul searching for himself as a callow youth and he got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he’s a good kid who would never advocate hurting anyone. His father says they believe that.

It’s a real chiller, the way they treated that kid. Think of all the 22-year-old kids in the country, dreaming of the time they can travel across the world … it’s going to have a negative effect.

How do you personally define patriotism?

“Patriotism” has become a word that brings up fear, and a word that brings up tightness and narrowness. There’s only one way to be a patriot: “My country, do or die,” as they used to say. Whereas, as far as I can recall, the Fourth of July was supposed to commemorate a revolution from an oppressive overlord. It seems obvious to me that the way to celebrate the Fourth of July is to remember that change is the only constant. You can’t kill all the people you disagree with; therefore you’ve got to think of a better way. To say that I aid terrorists when I question the government — you’re walking away from the meaning of July 4 there, buddy.

Let’s get back to remembering our roots, which is all about questioning and no one having the final answer. You can’t set the whole thing up in cement and expect it not to break.

How do you feel about the creation of the Department of Homeland Security?

It’s sort of a hype, a window dressing. Who cares if there’s a new goddamn department? Please tell the people in the NSA and the CIA and the FBI — they’ve been doing all this stuff all along. It’s just a shuffling and maybe an adding of places and people. But I don’t like what the word “homeland” does for it — it seems backwards, reminiscent of “fatherland,” like the Nazis called Germany. It has a ring of Über Alles.

Does it bother you that the Department of Homeland Security may be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act?

I think one of the main problems right now that is not meeting up with enough righteous indignation and opposition is the building of walls between what this democracy is doing and the press. That freedom of the press, the First Amendment, is not just, “Oh, in case anyone wants to find anything out, we’ll let you, and no one should oppress you for writing something.” No: It’s an institution that is dependent upon a democracy to keep it free.

We’ve already been getting strongly attacked by corporatization, and the gradual eroding of all those rules from the FCC that said you weren’t supposed to own more than one venue in a single market. Because much of the money in America has, over the last 10 to 15 years, been invested in new methods of communication, all the rules keeping it a public reality have been shrunk out from underneath us. Now we’ve got a guy like Rumsfeld who hates the press: When someone asks him about civilian casualties in Afghanistan this June, he says, “Obviously, you never ran a war!” Belittling the guy: “What’s wrong with you, wimp! Screw on your dick, you’ll understand.”

It’s so demeaning and so dangerous, because people sort of take the press for granted and it’s more and more become a money-making proposition, and it should be a civic institution because if we don’t have it … I’m a postman and you’re a secretary and he’s a sculptor, and we don’t have fucking time to watch everything these people are doing. We need the journalists, and if they are prohibited from doing their job because they’re “helping the enemy”… Here we have it: The Nazis were sledgehammering presses. If you don’t get it, look at history.

I recently started talking about the Freedom of Information Act onstage, and it’s more like the Freedom of the Magic Marker Act. You’ve seen people’s files: There’s no substance — it’s all been excised. Not to mention, what about the schmuck, Bush, when he decided to exempt presidential papers? He says, “No president starting from me …” in order to protect Reagan’s papers? Uck!

What was your reaction to the 9th Circuit Court’s decision about the Pledge of Allegiance?

I’ve always thought that. Why do we say “under God” and why not “under the dollar bill”? It says: In God We Trust. It should say: In Merrill Lynch We Trust! One nation under God — that’s bullshit! Why bring God into it? Leave that at home, or in church. It’s just bringing in strife and ugliness; it’s irrelevant. But obviously for some people, it’s not irrelevant. And they are the ones trying to shove their ideas down someone else’s throat. And the ones that say it should be there, like every bastard in the Senate, are just sucking up to their electorate. The ones who aren’t sucking up are only saving their asses.

Your show has some pretty radical political content. Has there been any backlash? Has anyone hassled you about your opinions?

I’m way too underground for people to give a shit, I guess, although the whole time I’ve been performing I’ve been purposefully excluded from the main shows — like Dave Letterman, the night before I was supposed to go on his show, someone called and said I would freak him out.

But so far, it’s been the opposite: People run up to me afterwards and write to me saying, “Thank you for saying all these things I’ve been wanting to say. I didn’t think I was allowed to say it.” People write that when they went back home and talked out loud, about how they felt happier. People say it’s a service. Everyone makes their contribution.

When I’m looking at people, if the light is such that I can see the audience members’ faces, yeah, some people have indicated that it’s not the majority opinion.

But to me, it’s not opinion: It’s common sense. Self-preservation. The boundaries have been broken, guys, don’t act like they haven’t. Don’t think that this satellite missile defense system is going to protect us … We are beyond that now, guys, and we have got to figure out what our place in the world neighborhood is, because we aren’t living on some other planet any longer.

Your show was launched last October, just after the attacks, and it’s still running eight months later and has moved to an even bigger venue. How has the show evolved during that time? Is it a work in progress?

The word “work in progress” in my experience is sort of a disclaimer meant for people who are not up for criticism — i.e., this is not a finished product and it will become what it’s meant to be at some point in the future. But I could just say that my show continues to change because now you have the Supreme Court saying, “We didn’t really mean the separation of church and state.” You can’t just walk past that and not mention that.

Recently, I’ve also been talking about needing some sort of symbol to show my solidarity with those people who died the most horrific death [by jumping out of the World Trade Center towers]. I imagine everyone thinks about that decision those people made, deciding whether to go down with the building or jump. Recently I started to state explicitly that these people were involuntary soldiers. I always meant that but I never said it. The last couple days I’ve connected with my real anger, [that the country put] these people in that fucking position. I’m not talking about because the FBI isn’t talking to the CIA. I’m talking about the longer level, the higher overview: How America conducts itself in business overall.

Do you think that your show has done so well because New York needs humor to help discuss the things they are bitter about?

When I cast this in a humorous light it makes it easier to accept it, because you can see the folly. I say something about looking at those buildings burning five blocks away, and I can’t help it, there’s a shock, over and over in my brain, saying, “Ashcroft thinks this is a perfect day.” Not that he is happy about the carnage, but that he’ll finally have permission to reform that Bill of Rights into the shape of the New Testament. People get that, and also it’s funny.

I only go so far as people want me to. It’s very important to be funny: If you’re not funny, you’re a politician, and no one trusts politicians. And that’s another real shame. You can’t throw your hat in the ring these days unless you have no morality left. Because a decent human being will not accept that invasion. Which is why you get a guy like Clinton, who started out beautiful and kept giving back and putting more layers of Saran Wrap around him until the only thing left that worked was his little penis.

Imagine Joice’s surprise then, when on May 22, just one day before senior graduation, she received a letter from a lawyer representing the girl’s family. The family felt that the teacher had graded unfairly, the letter said; they believed that their daughter hadn’t been given enough of a chance, and unless Joice took “whatever action is necessary to correct this situation” they were going to file a lawsuit.

The girl graduated with her class the next day, igniting a local battle that has yet to be settled. Parents and students are furious that the girl (whose name has been withheld from the media) was given what they believe to be an unfair boost. Teachers are livid at the school district, which forced Joice to retest the student at the last minute. The Arizona state bar is investigating the ethics of the girl’s lawyer. And the Peoria school district is defending its decision by claiming that the teacher hadn’t applied appropriate grading procedures.

Welcome to high school in America, 2002, where grades are a niggling annoyance that can be swept aside by a well-placed threat, and where teachers and administrators only have authority as long as they don’t displease parents. Bad grades, discipline problems, shocking attendance records: Offenses that in the past warranted school action as strong as suspension, dismissal from school or refusal to grant a diploma are easily blocked or reversed — as long as Dad’s got a good lawyer.

The struggle for classroom control comes in an increasingly intimidating school environment where teachers are commanded — by parents, administrators and the government — to usher students through a gantlet of tests to graduation without displeasing litigious families or failing to meet performance standards that bring schools added funding or, at the very least, ensure their survival for another year.

Says John Mitchell, deputy director of the American Federation of Teachers, “Teachers are under incredible pressure right now from two places: from policymakers to raise standards and teach to those higher standards. Then on the other side you have parents giving pressure to teachers not to hold kids up to the high standards. Teachers are between a rock and a hard place … It’s an area ripe for lawsuits.”

Indeed, the number of threats and lawsuits against teachers and schools — many of which fail to grab the attention of national media — has risen dramatically over the last decade, forcing schools to spend limited funds on lawyers and insurance, and teachers to spend more time protecting themselves from potential litigation; and, in the process, instituting defense strategies that are changing education in the country’s public schools — and not for the better. As classroom creativity is curbed by the fear of lawsuits, kids lose the benefits of their teachers’ inspiration and replace it with a different kind of lesson: that anything is possible if you have money or a capacity to complain.

Up until the moment when Elizabeth Joice received the letter from lawyer Stan Massad, her struggle with the failing senior was fairly typical. The warnings, the second chances — it was standard fare until May 22, the day before graduation and the day after a final meeting with the student’s parents.

The letter that Massad sent Joice represented the nadir in her long history of parent-teacher relations. The girl had been “scarred for life” by the flunking grade, the letter claimed. “Since hearing this devastating news, the student has been very sick, unable to sleep or eat and she has been forced to seek medical attention.” The letter went on to threaten Joice with a lawsuit and its attendant personal discomforts: “Of course, all information regarding your background, your employment records, all of your class records, past and present, dealings with this and other students become relevant, should litigation be necessary,” it said.

After she received the letter, Joice immediately sent it to the Sunshine Mountain High School principal and the school district. She also composed her own defiant response: “The student would be a very capable student if she would apply herself, study and get her assignments in on time,” she wrote. “Instead of being scarred for life, perhaps she will learn these lessons now, rather than when she is in college or in the work force. I think your clients would be better off investing their money in summer school tuition for the student rather than wasting their money on attorney fees, litigating a case with little likelihood of success.”

On the morning of May 23, however, Joice was informed by the school district that she needed to give the student a second chance. “I was told ‘You better decide what you are going to do, because that girl is going to walk tonight,’” Joice recalls. Just hours before graduation, Joice was instructed to give the student a second shot at a multiple-choice test she had already flunked once. The girl squeaked by, and was allowed to graduate.

Jack Erb, superintendent of the Peoria School District, swears that the district’s decision had nothing to do with the threat of a lawsuit, and claims that he didn’t see the lawyer’s letter until after they had decided to retest the student. “It isn’t an issue; people threaten us all the time and most the time they don’t follow through with it,” he says. He posits that the decision to retest the student was based on a quirk in Joice’s curriculum and grading system.

But after outraged parents and teachers from across the state sent furious letters to the local papers, complaining that the student shouldn’t have been granted special privileges, the district finally offered a general apology for its “lack of clear and appropriately enforced internal guidelines regarding grading and curriculum standards.” It said nothing about the legal threats, however. (The lawyer, in turn, is now being investigated by the state board of Arizona as to whether his veiled threats to Joice were ethical.)

Regardless of whether the district ultimately caved because it feared a lawsuit, the entire affair draws into relief the conflict currently taking place in classrooms across the country. Higher standards linked to higher stakes for schools have caused educators to be more rigorous. Concerned parents, facing tougher college entrance requirements for their kids, panic when their children falter, often blaming the teachers and schools for their children’s failures. The result, of late, is lawsuits, or, most often, threats of lawsuits.

An astounding 25 percent of all secondary schools were involved with lawsuits of all sorts — from accidental injuries to discipline squabbles — between 1997 and 1999, according to a 1999 survey by the American Tort Reform Association — a huge increase over the decade before. While some of these lawsuits were no doubt justifiable, there is no shortage of egregious litigation: Legal expert Walter Olson’s site Overlawyered.com, which chronicles legal ugliness in schools in order to point out the frivolous nature of American litigiousness, lists dozens of overzealous-parent lawsuits similar to threats in Peoria.

There was the lawsuit, for example, filed by 15-year-old Elizabeth Smith in Bath Township, Ohio, who sued her school district and 11 teachers in 2000 for $6 million, claiming that her grades were unfair. The school had lowered her grades because of frequent absences and tardiness, which the Smith family blamed on “chronic tonsillitis” and the fact that she stayed home to put her siblings on the school bus. Meanwhile, in Riverside, Calif., a football player sued his former high school teachers at Murrieta Valley High School for giving him grades that were too high: He claimed that his education suffered because they cut him too much slack so that he could play football.

School discipline is another area where teachers and parents struggle for the upper hand. Lacey Renfro, a high school student in Tennessee, sued the cheerleading coach after she was suspended from a game for disciplinary reasons; Justin Swindler in Pennsylvania sued because he was expelled for soliciting a hit man via his Web site to kill his English teacher; and a father in Tennessee sued two teachers after they confiscated his son’s yo-yo on a school trip where toys had been expressly forbidden.

Olson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, explains that, in the past, most schoolyard litigation grew out of incidents in which kids were barred from sports teams, or fell on the playground, or felt that they were discriminated against under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. It is rare that a simple grading squabble, such as the one in Peoria, will make it all the way to a court case — in part because of a 1978 Supreme Court ruling that held that courts shouldn’t second-guess a school on academic decisions (those grading squabbles that do make it all the way to lawsuits are usually under the purview of the Disabilities Act — i.e.: “My kid was disabled and deserved special treatment.”)

This doesn’t mean that parents still don’t threaten lawsuits over grades, however. Olson increasingly hears from school administrators who have received legal threats because of grading complaints and discipline issues. Few of these cases, he says, emerge in the media. “My guess is that the sort of strong-arming seen in the [Peoria] case is not in fact all that rare, but that the great majority of disputes never result in formal court filings and never result in publicity because neither side seeks it,” he explains.

Pressure exerted behind the scenes tends to be more insidious than the interaction involved in public lawsuits, which, because they are argued in the open, lack some of the more vicious personal threats and allegations. In Washington D.C., for example, a teacher at the competitive Wilson Senior High School recently discovered that in at least 11 cases, student grades had been raised without the teacher’s knowledge, apparently by an administrator who had felt pressured to help the students graduate (although no one has confessed to the act). Teachers who had flunked their students were appalled to see those same students walking across the stage at graduation.

One of those students had been in the Spanish class of teacher Anexora Skvirsky, who had given her a generous D — and was promptly threatened by the student’s father. Although she held her ground against the parent at the time, a year later someone in the administration apparently did not. Although Svirsky has been teaching for 19 years, she says it’s only been in the last few years that she’s witnessed such “an incredible advocacy” on the part of parents. Although she’s never received a legal threat, parents regularly try to get her fired by complaining to the principal.

“It is hellish,” she says. “So many times I’ve had stomachaches, headaches, insomnia, because a parent would call and try to intimidate me or complain about me to the principal with a letter.”

Skvirsky places the guilt for the 11 anonymous grade changes squarely on the shoulders of the school’s administrators, who she says regularly cave to powerful parents who “move mountains by just complaining.” This, say teacher advocacy groups, is becoming a common occurrence, particularly in schools with rigorous academics and demanding parents.

“I’m afraid Peoria is not an anomaly; it’s not commonplace but it’s not unusual for teachers to be told to change grades,” says Mitchell of the American Federation of Teachers. “In most cases the teacher refuses to do it and the administrator does it over their protestations.”

But this is not a totally new phenomenon, either. According to Kathleen Lyons, spokesperson for the National Education Foundation, the occasional case in which unhappy parents threatened teachers with lawsuits and retribution if grades weren’t raised has always existed. The difference now is that behavior of the last resort has become almost routine.

“There have always been some parents who want a special deal for their child,” Lyons says. “There’s nothing new there, except that a higher-stakes educational environment and the high stakes of standardized testing has led to high stress. Parents now know it does make a difference how your kids do in school.

“I think there’s a lot more riding on it,” she adds, “and that does tend to bring out the worst in people: When the stakes are high, you find transgressions.”

One solution is to completely standardize education — testing, grading and discipline — so that there is no wiggle room in the system for outraged parents and their lawyers. But that resolution already has prompted other kinds of parent lawsuits — in California and Texas — that claim that the system is too rigid, and discriminates against their children’s special needs.

Worse, total standardization can extinguish all creativity from the classroom. In Peoria, where the school district has reacted to the controversy by writing a new series of standardized rules for the classroom, Joice worries that teachers are ultimately going to become automatons. “We may not be able to be as creative with the units we use, which will be a travesty because every teacher has a specialty and if we can’t share that with our students, if it’s all black and white, then that’s sad,” she says. “If that’s the case, why they don’t just put computers out in the classroom as teachers?”

Even in districts that haven’t bowed to pressure with standardized grading, the fear of lawsuits and parental retribution has undermined school programs and teachers’ daily routines. Twenty percent of the respondents to the American Tort Reform Association survey, for example, reported spending five to 10 hours a week in meetings or documenting every little action they took with a student, in case of future litigation.

“It takes a lot of time to document everything: You have to document conversations, what you did, what the kids said in class,” says Joice. “It will take more effort on the part of teachers if they want to stand up and say what happened.”

Besides the simple question of time, lawsuits also come at a high cost for school districts and teachers: even a frivolous lawsuit over a grading dispute, which might be thrown out after just one hearing, can cost $10,000 in lawyers fees. School districts do have liability insurance, of course, as do teachers (some professional teachers organizations, such as the Texas State Teacher’s Association, lure members with the promise of $6 million in liability insurance for those moments when “people are reacting with emotion rather than reason”). But that costs money, too.

“Lawsuits have become a great cost for school districts,” says Julie Underwood, general counsel for the National School Boards Association. “The entire sub-specialty of education law didn’t exist 25 years ago, and now it’s a big, recognized sub-specialty. You can’t keep track of the number of times that someone comes in to a principal’s office and says, ‘If you don’t do this, I’ll sue you.’ It’s just so commonplace.” In fact, she says, all principals now have to undergo education-law classes before they can receive certification.

Finally, the students risk both the quality of their education and their faith in the system. Kids with lackluster achievement records who nevertheless head off to college with satisfactory grades thanks to Mom’s strong-arm tactics are probably not going to make it far in higher education. Their classmates, who actually worked hard for their grades, will probably be demoralized too.

“It undermines the hard work of other kids in the classroom, when they see standards change for one student. It erodes the standards, when we really want students to know that standards are meaningful. And for students involved, it really cheats them of a meaningful experience,” says Mitchell. “Sometimes failure is the best teacher a student could have.”

This story has been corrected since it was first published.