306 Comments
User's avatar
Val Uptuous NotAgain's avatar

“…no matter a child’s age, no matter whether a child actually desires these things, …”

So the law in Oregon states you have to go to pride events and get puberty blockers for all adopted children?

Do they really not see how fucking ridiculous they sound?

Further down they talk about an infant not understanding gender affirming care. Well duh. But adopted children don’t stay infants forever. This woman has five children already, she should know this. But based on this assertion, she’s unqualified anyway. What happens when the baby becomes a toddler, or a child, or a teen and no longer fits her ideal of cuteness and sweetness? It sounds as though she’s interested in babies as objects and not the people they are.

Babies are born without knowledge of gender or sexual orientation, but as they grow they learn, even if their parents try to shield them. You don’t know if the baby you have, by birth or adoption, will be LGBT or not and you as a parent are supposed to love that person unconditionally. But these type of Christians know nothing about unconditional love, since their entire entities are wrapped up in their religion that is based on a god that tells us he loves us unconditionally as long as you follow these conditions. And even shows contempt and violence towards those he supposedly loves.

This woman probably needs child protective services to investigate her biological children considering how awful she sounds.

I’m being knee jerk judgmental here, but it’s clear she is manipulative by the lawsuit she’s filing. Who knows how deep this is. And I wouldn’t leave a goldfish with the lawyers either, let alone children.

Expand full comment
Zorginipsoundsor's avatar

I can't help but wonder if she was recruited to do this.

Expand full comment
Val Uptuous NotAgain's avatar

It wouldn’t surprise me. It’s typical of religious activist groups. Think the lady from Roe v Wade turning pro-life for the money. Perhaps we can follow the money on this case.

Expand full comment
cdbunch's avatar

That hadn't occurred to me, but is all too distinct a possibility. They've already gotten the courts to establish that their "religious freedom" allows them to deny LGBT people a child. Now they want to use their "religious freedom" to make sure no one can return the favor, even if it is to the detriment of the child.

Because of course the children are just pawns in their campaign of genocide. When they aren't the object. (Gregg Abbott, I'm looking at you)

Expand full comment
Brenda Harper MSW's avatar

I totally support the state of Oregon. As a therapist I can say I have seen so much harm to children from religious zealot parents. A child in Foster care already has enough challenges to place them in a home where religious freaks put them at risk of additional rejects would be cruel.

Expand full comment
Marycat2021's avatar

Of course she was. Somebody's paying the legal fees, and it's not her.

Expand full comment
wreck's avatar

You misspelled "Groomed".

Expand full comment
Zorginipsoundsor's avatar

"It sounds as though she’s interested in babies as objects and not the people they are."

Evilgelicals are taught that their children are their property.

Expand full comment
OwossoHarpist's avatar

"Evilgelicals are taught that their children are their property."

One example: when AiG's Dumb Idiot Ham would nowadays asks heartlessly in his drivels, "Who owns children?" as if he regards children as slaves to the parents just as he regards women as slaves to their male partners and blacks and browns as slaves to the whites.

Seriously, Can anyone tell him that the real answer to his question is "no one?"

Expand full comment
Val Uptuous NotAgain's avatar

Or themselves.

Expand full comment
Marycat2021's avatar

Sexual identity is not learned or acquired. It is something one is born with. I never saw my daughter "learn" to be a lesbian.

Expand full comment
Val Uptuous NotAgain's avatar

You’re right, I used the wrong terminology here. More like they realize they are LGBT and learn about what that is. I did not mean to imply that people learn to be gay or transgender or queer.

Expand full comment
Black Hole and DM mourner's avatar

I have the same opinion as you so we are two.

Expand full comment
jomicur's avatar

I have a picture of myself when I was two.

Expand full comment
Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz's avatar

Cave drawing?

Expand full comment
jomicur's avatar

I went to high school in the Pleistocene. I sat right between Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell. Harrison Ford was in the next classroom. When I was a boy we used to have to tame our own mastodons. These modern kids are so spoiled! 😵‍💫

Expand full comment
Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz's avatar

Uphill in the ice age, both ways!

Expand full comment
Zorginipsoundsor's avatar

Would you like to borrow my geezer emoji?

Expand full comment
Black Hole and DM mourner's avatar

2 minutes ? 2 months ? 2 K years ?

Expand full comment
wreck's avatar

Schizophrenic.

Expand full comment
oraxx's avatar

There is no horror that cannot be, and has not been, justified in the name of religion. I sincerely hope this woman is never allowed to adopt children. They will be indoctrinated in her lunacy from birth.

Expand full comment
Dahak's avatar

She has five kids already and wants to adopt a new born, how the hell can she afford to raise 5+ kids on a single income? This seems like a typical ADF lawsuit.

Expand full comment
Freodin's avatar

That's why we need to get rid of child labour laws! So that these kids can go to work in mines and slaughterhouses and demolition sites and pay for more kids in the house that can be indoctrinated into Christianity and denied their own personality.

That's the way Jesus wants it!

(/s)

Expand full comment
Maltnothops's avatar

“She cannot even adopt a newborn who has no concept of, much less a desire for, these things"

The newborn might not have a desire for batshit religion either.

Expand full comment
cdbunch's avatar

This isn't religion, this is bigotry with a watered-down coat of Jesus-paint.

Expand full comment
Maltnothops's avatar

It can be — and is — both.

Expand full comment
Richard Wade's avatar

I would feel sorry for even a completely cis and straight kid being raised by this ignorant, bigoted fanatic. She would want to turn him/her into a super bigot to avenge all the times she has been thwarted in promoting her homophobia-IS-true-Christianity views.

Expand full comment
jomicur's avatar

We've seen example after example of it. Phyllis Schlafly's self-loathing gay son comes to mind at once.

Expand full comment
wreck's avatar

Can't she adopt a toddler more to her liking, maybe Marjorie Traitor Greene?

Expand full comment
Zorginipsoundsor's avatar

She probably doesn't want one that is not potty trained.

Expand full comment
Val Uptuous NotAgain's avatar

She’s getting divorced, does that mean she’s dropping the Greene? Then we can just call her Marjorie the Traitor.

Expand full comment
Black Hole and DM mourner's avatar

I though good christians women were supposed to suck it up and never divorce /s

Expand full comment
cdbunch's avatar

That's for peons. Women with power can ignore little rules like that. Only battered women are supposed to stick it out no matter what "for the sake of the children"

Expand full comment
jomicur's avatar

You know better than that. Christian "moral rules" never apply to christians themselves, only to the rest of us.

Expand full comment
Whitney's avatar

Hmm. I have questions here. Mostly, I'd really like to know how a single mom with five children already is supporting herself and her kids yet somehow still has time to push her Christian agenda so hard.

This sort of attitude has bothered me for a while now. It sure seems like there are an inordinate number of Christians around who want to have their cake and eat it too; they want to be able to espouse their beliefs on every street corner but not suffer the consequences for those beliefs. This sort of thing always strikes me as a toddler having a temper tantrum, but from what I've seen most Christians scream 'persecution' when it happens as though they're in the right. The worst of this is all the sympathy they tend to get from fellow Christians, which may well be part of why they're doing this.

Stick to your rules, Oregon. This woman shouldn't be allow to raise any kids at all, and not allowing her more is the right call.

Expand full comment
Guerillasurgeon's avatar

I'd like to know why someone who belongs to a group that insists that kids need a mother and a father, wants to adopt a child into a family only has a mother.

Expand full comment
Ben J's avatar

Think of it as a problem and bullying. Bullies like to punch down. They like to think that people agree with them that it's right for them to be bullies, and it's right for the people who are being bullied to be bullied.

They scream persecution constantly because that gives them the justification for being bullies.i've seem this a lot lately when it comes to anti-trans people. Six have now told me categorically that the facts and their misconceptions don't matter. They are not going to change their opinions-- because they have them. You see the same phenomenon with anti-vaxxers.

Expand full comment
Ben J's avatar

As I have written before, I knew I was gay when I was three or four years old. I didn't know what "it" was, and I didn't know what it meant, but I knew that I was different from other boys in a way that involves other boys, and I knew I had better not talk about it. But I absolutely knew.

Virtually every child gets this while they're growing up from the moment they're capable of understandinh\g language. don't be different, don't touch down there, it's all bad bad bad. I have had a great life is a gay man, and I have very few complaints. But what a difference it would've made to know that I was fine just as I was.

Expand full comment
Straw's avatar

I think there is a culture gap between big parts of US and most of Scandinavia. My mom (b 1941) once told me not to touch myself. I did not care. My kids knew we were safe to talk to. And they did. My happiest moment as a parent was when we were the first person's who was told.

Expand full comment
Ben J's avatar

You are lucky that you trusted your parents and that they were trustworthy. I learned not to trust mine.

Expand full comment
Joe King's avatar

Bigoted Christian claims persecution when called out on their bigotry. In other news, sun rises in the east and Francisco Franco is still dead.

Expand full comment
larry parker's avatar

No, Franco is not dead. He just went home.

Oops, my bad. It's Elvis that went home.

Expand full comment
Zorginipsoundsor's avatar

Strange, I thought he was working the night shift at a 7-11 somewhere in Montana. 🤔

Expand full comment
Joan the Dork's avatar

Setting aside the bigotry for a moment...

Firstly, we can all guess why you want more kids, and it's not because you think you'll be a good parent to them. You're not in the business of raising children, you're in the business of training up an army of obedient little Christian Soldiers to conquer the world for Jesus. That 𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘦 should remove you from consideration. A parent's first duty is to do right by their children. You clearly won't do that, even for your cis/het kids- you want minions, not offspring. You'll put your dogshit religion ahead of your children's needs every time- we know it, you know it, even the Stop sign on the corner of your block knows it.

Secondly... you've already got 𝘧𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘬𝘪𝘥𝘴, lady. Prove you can raise 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮 into happy, well adjusted adults, then we can talk about letting you adopt more. I'd imagine that as a single parent you already have your hands full, and I'm guessing that your older kids share a lot of the responsibility caring for their younger siblings, and that would already be a problem on its own. No child should have to spend their childhood being an adult. The more kids you pile into your home, the greater the certainty that at least some of them will never really have a childhood at all.

Not only should the State not let you adopt any more children... they should take a good, hard look at how you're raising the ones you've already got.

Expand full comment
wreck's avatar

She's channeling her inner Duggar.

Expand full comment
cdbunch's avatar

So it doesn't feel so good when the shoe is on the other foot, does it?

Once again ADF shows that their beliefs and those they support are based on bigotry. Would you place a black child with a White Supremacist? Or a Jewish child?

I grew up in IFB family. I wasn't able to accept myself until I was 28. I regret about 14 years wasted in denial.

My only concern is that the courts (especially our thrice-damned SCOTUS) might buy this religious freedom bullshit.

Expand full comment
cdbunch's avatar

Independent Fundamentalist Baptists. They think Southern Baptists are too liberal.

Expand full comment
Troublesh00ter's avatar

Independent Fundamentalist Baptist, if I'm not mistaken ... though it may also stand for:

Irritable Fucked-up Bums as well.

Expand full comment
cdbunch's avatar

No, I wasn't talking about hemorrhoids. They have Preparation H for those.

Expand full comment
jomicur's avatar

InFormation Broken.

Expand full comment
Zorginipsoundsor's avatar

The ones that want the government to kill all LGBTQ people. Hemant posted a lot about them in his week in review posts.

Expand full comment
cdbunch's avatar

Not quite, those are NIFB, they're an even more radical group.

IFB's just kept screaming AIDS was God's punishment and was "Killing all the right people"

IFBs are megachurch wanna-bes before megachurches were really a thing.

Expand full comment
Black Hole and DM mourner's avatar

Compared to the catholic/protestant/orthodox description used in France all your various denominations are difficult to memorize 🤪

Expand full comment
ericc's avatar

IANAL but this seems pretty cut and dried as a legal case. If the Oregon DHS policy is legal, then they are legally allowed to reject applicants who won't follow it. The suit would have to attack the policy itself to have any good chance of success.

"Even if a child wasn’t old enough to understand their orientation or identity..."

This is something of a non-issue, IMO. A kid can easily understand it in kid terms. I had to cover this topic with my six-year-old due to some questions he had. It was easy. Similarly to how he 'like-liked' a girl in his class, a gay kid is a boy who like-likes boys or a girl who like-likes girls. He thought that was weird, but he easily understood it, and he didn't think it was bad, just different. Because I didn't present it as bad, just as a fact.

Expand full comment
cdbunch's avatar

It isn't that simple. It is in fact very different from the inside. "That's weird" Very few young children want to be weird. There's a lot of denial and self-hate involved. Accepting parents can minimize that, but not eliminate it. Parents like this woman deny a child even this limited vocabulary.

Expand full comment
ericc's avatar

"You must not see it as wierd," wasn't the day 1 goal. Day 1 was just setting his feet on the right path. Act with tolerance, respect, not make a big deal out of it. He *walked* that path to full acceptance pretty much on his own, without dad having to 'correct' his feelings. And while I recognize that that might not always work, it worked for my kid.

Agreed, Ms. Bates (apropriate?) seems unwilling to give her kids the support they'd need to be anything but her cookie-cutter idea of a kid.

Expand full comment
Zorginipsoundsor's avatar

A decade or more ago, Bill Maxwell, a black TBT columnist, wrote about a survey that asked black people the question, "If you could be white, would you choose to be white." The majority of the participants answered yes. The point is that few people would choose to be a member of a discriminated against, or even hated minority.

Expand full comment
cdbunch's avatar

That is true, but I think it goes deeper than that. Even if LGBT people were not hated, not discriminated against, just weird, I really think we'd still have these feelings to a lesser degree, of course so might black children.

You have to be old enough to have some experience with "normal", before you can appreciate being weird.

Expand full comment
jomicur's avatar

OT: Turns out Harlan Crow, the guy who funded Clarence Thomas' hyper-luxurious vacations, also gave money to Sinema and Manchin. Anyone who's not surprised, speak up now. Anyone who doesn't think the US government is corrupt down to its bones, give a cheer! Anyone? Anyone at all? <crickets>

https://www.alternet.org/billionaire-donor/

Expand full comment
Slowly Boiled Frog's avatar

The judge in this case, Adrienne Nelson, is brilliant (Phi Beta Kappa - graduated college suma cum laude). Moreover, she is a federal judge at the urging of Ron Wyden who was the first U.S. senator to support marriage equality. Nelson was on the Oregon Supreme Court and has a significant judicial CV.

Bates wants to adopt a related pair of children under the age of 10. What would this imbecile do if one or both turned out to be gay? What would she do in the event of gender dysphoria? Conversion "therapy?"

Expand full comment
jomicur's avatar

I was adopted, and my adoptive father was a fairly brutal alcoholic, but at least he never tried to beat Jesus into me. (My adoptive mother, by contrast, was a wonderful woman. She's been dead nearly 50 years, and I still miss her.) I knew when I was five that I was attracted to other boys in the same way most boys liked little girls. And I had a boyfriend when I was that age, too, and yes, we "played doctor,' including some rather advanced, er, medical procedures. I shudder to think how hellish my life would have been if I'd been adopted by someone like this woman.

Expand full comment
NOGODZ20's avatar

Or how about any of her 5 biological children? What if they suddenly begin showing certain preferences? She'd hit the ceiling.

Expand full comment
Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz's avatar

Hopefully that's all she hits.

Expand full comment
cdbunch's avatar

You are an optimist. The Pearls book is almost certainly on her nightstand.

Expand full comment
Marycat2021's avatar

I just don't understand why people are so afraid of other people just for their being different. They're not hurting anyone. You can't teach a child their sexual identity, they're born with it just as cisgender people are. Live and let live. And "God" has no gender.

Expand full comment
jomicur's avatar

They're afraid of LGBT people because when A) we're loved and accepted, and B) no catastrophes, no fire and brimstone, are inflicted on the nation, it gives one more VERY STRONG proof that their "Good Book" and their beliefs are rubbish.

Expand full comment
cdbunch's avatar

There's also the haunting fear that we're having better sex and don't even have to worry about accidental pregnancy.

Expand full comment
Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz's avatar

With god, anything is possible.

Expand full comment
NOGODZ20's avatar

"With god, anything is possible."

Except for defeating iron chariots, of course.

Expand full comment
cdbunch's avatar

There was a movie about that. Rather funny.

Expand full comment
cdbunch's avatar

No. Paternity. I think I saw it on Prime.

A man lets his boyfriend top for a change and ends up pregnant.

Expand full comment
Joan the Dork's avatar

Especially the Ts. We're some of the best evidence against an infallible creator god anyone could ask for- our mere existence means their goddything is capable of fucking up his "perfect" creations, and that just 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘥𝘰.

Expand full comment
jomicur's avatar

Shame on you for choosing that lifestyle, then! 🥸

Expand full comment
cdbunch's avatar

My theological theory on trans people used to be that they were souls that had lived several lives as one gender and had decided this time around they wanted to try life as the other gender but couldn't adapt to the difference. (This was before I'd ever heard the concept of non-binary)

Expand full comment
NOGODZ20's avatar

Religion is all about fear of "the other."

Expand full comment
jomicur's avatar

You can't very well be "God's select" unless God also hates everybody else.

Expand full comment
Matilda's avatar

What a nasty horrible bigot. I think it was Pastor Rick Warren's wife, Kay who went to Africa in the early 2000s and was horrified by how many orphans there were, thousands from the HIV-AIDS epidemic. She campaigned for every church to have an 'adoption policy' and USians and other westerners rushed abroad in droves to adopt these little heathens. I know many were well-intentioned but some, whose blogs I read regularly back then, admitted they wanted to raise as many x-tian warriors as possible to fight in the battle with evil islam that was coming soon. It's tragic how many of these adoptions broke down cos the few weeks of prayer the adopters put in, didn't miraculously heal the immense physical and psychological traumas their adoptees had experienced. I shudder to think how this apology for a mother would treat any adoptee.....and the horrific trauma they'd go through when they realised they were LGBTQTIA+ in her home. Some of my family go to a church which has a homophobic pastor - and 3 small sons. I go sometimes and they sit in front of me with 2 little boy buddies the same age.....and I will for at least one to be gay.....and hope they will survive the parental onslaughts this will probably heap upon them.

Expand full comment