I'm infuriated

I was reading a blog regarding adoption from Vietnam and came across the following post. Mrs. B has a great blog and I read it faithfully.

Here is her post from yesterday...

Thursday, July 06, 2006
What affects one affects all

Jennefer over at Three sons and a princess linked to a LA Times article today in a great post about her unintentional connection to Angelina Jolie. Like I said, it's a great post and has some good discussion-generating questions at the end. But the Times article itself struck me as horribly smarmy and I couldn’t get it out of my head all day.

How to Shop for Kids the Brangelina Way is a disgustingly crass look at Brad and Angelina’s options for their next adoption. As I blogged earlier Angelina said in a recent interview that their next child will be adopted… however she didn’t say when they planned to start another adoption. But that doesn’t stop the LA Times from taking pot shots at the couple and then discussing their options as one might discuss which store sells the best shoes. China, the article says, is “like an adorable, adoptable-children machine”. It describes Russia as “the second biggest supplier of adoptable moppets. “ and Kazakhstan is “A rising contender in family-building.” Korea the LA Times says is, “A nice place to get a very tiny infant, which seems to be Jolie's adoptee size of choice…Plus, she could phone in her baby order from her VIP suite at the Raffles L'Hermitage in Beverly Hills; South Korea does not require aspiring parents to visit.” And then it goes on to describe the Ukraine as a “dark horse contender” but points out this downside: “A kid needs to be available for a year before she can snatch one, unless the child is ill.”

This article isn’t just snarky and insulting to Angelina… it’s an insult to every person involved in international adoption: birth parents, children and adoptive parents alike. One could try to blow it off as a lame entertainment puff piece but the LA Times is a big paper and their articles are often syndicated around the world, which means this ignorant insulting little piece could influence the attitudes and pre-conceived biases of hundreds of thousands of people.

I went looking for an email address for the author, Leslie Gornstein and I found that this article is actually from June 27th and the Times apparently got quite a response from the adoption community. That is good to know. What is not so good was the Times Editor's reply: "The editors and writer Leslie Gornstein were satirizing a specific person, Angelina Jolie, who had remarked that her next adoption would depend on "which country, which race would fit best with the kids." The satire was in no way intended to be a commentary on all individuals who adopt."

Apparently, the Times did not get quite enough letters to get through their thick skulls that their lame “satire” did in fact insult the entire adoption community. Their own poll proves this point: of 230 respondents only 60 percent agreed with the statement “yes, this is an unfunny, hurtful article”. The other thirty percent of the population think it was “clearly harmless satire.” If this is the message the editors are left with, that such a large portion of their readership has no problem with that type of “satire”, you can bet we’ll see more articles smearing adoption in the future.

There are two simple solutions.

One: vote in their poll.

Two: write a letter to the editors.