Salon.com > Laura Barcella

How the Christian right perverts adoption

Sat, 04 May 2013 21:00:00 +0000

When you think of adoption, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? Maybe it’s the vague, rosy notion of a happy ending -- of rescue, salvation or (more likely) some do-gooding Hollywood mouthpiece like Angelina Jolie adding kids of various ethnicities to her big, colorful brood.

What probably doesn’t automatically come to mind is coercion, racism and a conservative Christian agenda that extends beyond mere abortion prevention. Award-winning journalist Kathryn Joyce describes all these issues -- and, sadly, many more -- as being shockingly rampant in the multi-billion-dollar adoption industry. And she delves into them, in somewhat jarring investigative detail, in her new book, “The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption.”

I want candy

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 17:22:00 +0000

It was 11:42 pm on a Monday, and I'd just been dumped by the nice guy from Alaska. We'd been dating for three months before he realized, after a messy and recent divorce from his "best friend," that he wasn't ready to fall in love again. I'd had my doubts about our relationship, too, but I'd stuffed them down—goddammit, this was going to work.

But... It didn't work, and here I was, teary and hollow on the couch, hit by a towering wave of craving. I needed candy. Now. Not any candy—a certain kind. Rather, two certain kinds, both sold in bulk: a vaguely sour but mostly sugary "natural" gummy bear, and a bracingly sweet sort of tropical-flavored jelly bean. I knew I could find said candies at the Safeway on Market Street, so I threw on my coat, grabbed my car keys, and ignored the irritating internal voice that calculated the calories and scolded me against the sugar. I knew that voice was right—once I started, I wouldn't stop—but right now, in this miserable moment, I didn't give a shit.

Nazis, breasts and guns: Has Madonna lost it?

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 15:35:00 +0000

“What’s up with Madonna lately?” a friend asked recently as we were attempting to evade the oppressive July heat in a Manhattan bookstore. She was referring, of course, to Madonna’s super-controversial summer. And she’s not the only one wondering.

Currently on a world tour to promote her latest album, “MDNA,” Madonna’s recent antics have been a bit dramatic, even for her. Let us count the bizarre shenanigans from the beginning. Since June, she’s flashed a nipple during a Turkey live show, flashed her butt a few days later in Italy, shown a video with swastikas superimposed over right-wing leaders’ faces, and continued to use authentic-looking fake guns as part of her choreography even after being asked to cut them from the show following July 20’s movie-theater massacre in Aurora, Colo.

The A-word

Mon, 20 Sep 2004 16:39:00 +0000

"It was the safest place, but I felt vulnerable," admits 34-year-old author and "professional feminist" Jennifer Baumgardner, between bites of panini at an East Village cafe, in New York. She is referring to the sole occasion -- April's March for Women's Lives in Washington -- on which she wore one of her controversial T-shirts, which read, simply, "I had an abortion." Eight months pregnant, Baumgardner mentions the piles of hate mail she has received since producing the tees, and half-jokingly whispers about a fear of getting shot.

Baumgardner, who created the shirts in 2003 when she began work on a film also called "I Had an Abortion," insists that she didn't design them for shock value, but to spark discussion about abortion and help "personalize" the still-taboo subject.

Still, why would anyone advertise something so personal? "To destigmatize what's still known as the A-word," says Jane Bovard, 61, president of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, who with her staff at the Red River Women's Clinic, in Fargo, N.D, have "once or twice" sported the shirts en masse to after-work happy hour. "No one has said anything at all," Bovard notes. (Not everyone is so tolerant of the shirts; when singer Ani DiFranco donned one in Inc., the magazine received several angry letters and lost some subscribers.)