<3 <3 <3

 EPA/ARLEEN NG – Helen Zia and Lia Shigemura on their wedding day with Zia’s mother, Beilin Zia

Wishing all of you much love in the coming year.

Welcome adoptive parents

Bet you never thought you’d see a post with that title here.

So I see some of you have wandered over from an adoption yahoo group. What brought you here? What are you thinking? And do you plan to stay? ;-)

Dear Jon Huntsman

You and your wife have seven kids. Full stop. Not “seven kids, including two adopted girls from China and India.” Unless, of course, you wish me to understand that you are such a wonderful human being for adopting:

The family adopts Gracie Mei from Yangzhou, China. She’d been abandoned in a vegetable market. The path to adoption began when Mary Kaye volunteered in a Catholic orphanage while they were living in Tien Mu, Taiwan. After they returned to the U.S., Mary Kaye continued to research adoptions and convinced Jon to start the process. While attending a Christmas tree benefit auction she bought a tree dedicated to adoption. When the vendor asked her what to name it, her kids suggested the name for the new sister they hoped to someday have, Gracie Mei. Mary Kaye told the vendor that name at 8:15 PM. When she returned home there was a message received at 8:15 PM from the adoption agency notifying her that they had found a child for the family. Gracie Mei knows her story and loves to tell it. When asked who found her in the market she replies, “Jesus.”

Too bad that research didn’t include anything about transracial adoption.  (Quotes from Huntsman’s website.)

Since you like to detail your kids’ origins, here’s my suggestion: “The Huntsmans have seven children, including five squirted out of Mary Kaye’s vagina.” Or maybe she had C-sections.  Or VBAC.  Why aren’t those details available?

All you need is love

Brian J. Clark, The Virginian-Pilot

Love (and a dismantling of institutionalized homophobia) is all you need.

“An Indian Inventor Disrupts the Period Industry”

I noticed recently how often the shelter here requests sanitary products for its guests. It is a real problem for women all over the world. In India, up steps Arunachalam Muruganantham:

When Arunachalam Muruganantham hit a wall in his research on creating a sanitary napkin for poor women, he decided to do what most men typically wouldn’t dream of. He wore one himself–for a whole week. Fashioning his own menstruating uterus by filling a bladder with goat’s blood, Muruganantham went about his life while wearing women’s underwear, occasionally squeezing the contraption to test out his latest iteration. It resulted in endless derision and almost destroyed his family. But no one is laughing at him anymore, as the sanitary napkin-making machine he went on to create is transforming the lives of rural women across India.

Source.

If I were a rich white guy …

I would think twice before spewing uninformed crap that reveals what privilege smells like.

There’s no shortage of white folks who think they could do poverty better than us poor underprivileged minorities.   Because we don’t yank on our bootstraps hard enough.  Take Gene Marks (pictured above) as an example.  Marks writes for Forbes Magazine.  And he is full of advice on what he would do if he “was [sic] a poor black kid.”

What would I do if I were a rich white guy?  Well, I started to write out a bunch of witty rejoinders.  But then I just couldn’t.  Because this is a serious issue that deserves a serious response.  So here goes.

If I was a poor black kid

[Note: Items tagged 'no endorsement here' are provided for the convenience of readers and do not represent the opinion of RR. ]

President Obama gave an excellent speech last week in Kansas about inequality in America.

“This is the defining issue of our time.” He said. “This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. Because what’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, secure their retirement.”

He’s right. The spread between rich and poor has gotten wider over the decades. And the opportunities for the 99% have become harder to realize.

The President’s speech got me thinking. My kids are no smarter than similar kids their age from the inner city. My kids have it much easier than their counterparts from West Philadelphia. The world is not fair to those kids mainly because they had the misfortune of being born two miles away into a more difficult part of the world and with a skin color that makes realizing the opportunities that the President spoke about that much harder. This is a fact. In 2011.

In need of a history lesson

So Edward Rothstein writes a “review” of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Learning Center in Powell, Wyoming.  Heart Mountain was one of ten or so U.S. concentration camps located in desolate areas.  During World War II, the camps housed approximately 110,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. They hadn’t been accused of crimes. Intelligence didn’t suggest they were a threat to national security. They were rounded up and held without trial because of their race. Even small children and orphans.

Rothstein devotes about a quarter of his article to a review of the center.  The rest?  Rationale for the internment.

First, we’ve got the “they did it too” argument:

Dear Lowe’s

Subtitled:  Go Ted Lieu!

I am an American.  I am not a Christian.   I am a Lowe’s customer.

I believe in freedom of religion.  I believe in the right to choose not to practice a religion.

And I believe companies should check out the background of groups with names like “Florida Family Association” before making decisions that support religious bigotry.  Or homophobia, for that matter.

I suspect that Ted Lieu, like me, is not an American Muslim.  But like me, he is an American who is deeply troubled by the xenophobic, racist nature of our society.  Undoubtedly, like me, he knows first-hand what it is like to be subjected to racism and xenophobia on a regular basis.

I always assumed that rational people understood my beliefs were not necessarily amoral just because they were not founded in Christianity.  But maybe I was wrong.

Maybe now is the time to let you know.  So Lowe’s, I will write to you to ask you not to give in to religious bigotry and hate mongering.  Lowe’s, I will write to you know that this is my country.  And hate is not a family value.

Cry, baby, cry

This is 21-year-old Kevin Shdeed as he learned that he will serve three months of a one-year jail sentence with the balance suspended.  Shdeed was convicted for an attack on a black teenager, in which he and at least six others assaulted a black teenager with fists, feet, sticks, knives and beer bottles.  (Witness reports state there were probably 10 to 12 individuals involved.)  They continued to attack him even after he became unconscious.

The recent news reports on the sentencing are light on the details of the assault.  This is from a 2010 article: