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Post by km on Aug 9, 2010 12:47:16 GMT -5
Even with her lilting soft voice, it sounded very aggressive to me. Way to trample all over the mothers who, despite loving and cherishing their children, wish for a little reprieve now and then or look forward to sending them off as adults. THIS. I think this is what I was getting: "Wow, this all seems very aggressive and harsh in spite of the sweet soft voice." Anyway, I think you hit the nail on the head.
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Post by km on Aug 9, 2010 11:14:10 GMT -5
ShelleyC: I'm curious to know more about your motivations in all of this even after you'd googled Gothard and found such damning information about him. I'm surprised that being ditched by Cecilia made you feel even more determined to gain her approval (even though she would never know you were doing these new things that she and her husband approved of.). Did you think at the time that all of that information about him was part of some kind of campaign to persecute Christians, or did you just try to ignore everything you'd read? And by the way, did you ever use ATI to educate your kids?
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Post by km on Aug 9, 2010 8:55:19 GMT -5
arietty: I basically agree with you. Also, I wasn't explicitly referring to the sing-songy voice, but to the fact that she doesn't seem to recognize the presence of the other person in the room with her and just kinda gets lost in her own monologue. And I don't like pop psych in general, but I guess I prefer it to "demon possession"? In any case, that was a fair enough reminder. I'm not comfortable in general with speculating about the mental health of people I don't know.
ETA: They do say that they're from New Zealand--not Australia--on the Above Rubies website. I know there are some linguistic similarities, but wanted to make a note of this. In any case, though, her linguistic patterns aren't really what I was thinking about.
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Post by km on Aug 8, 2010 20:16:02 GMT -5
Huh, well for me, I'd be more comfortable describing her creepiness as probable narcissism (and possibly psychopathy) and a cartoonish demeanor. And I'm the one who doesn't like armchair psych...
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Post by km on Aug 8, 2010 13:26:45 GMT -5
I think maybe whenever anything gets unpleasant, instead of spending any money to fix it, this guy decides it's time for a mission trip and goes off somewhere for months. Yes, I think this seems right. And, yeah, even most straight men I know these days have learned the basics just because they don't get married as young as men used to get married. My brother-in-law does most of the cooking because my sister isn't really big on cooking, and I don't think this is as rare as it used to be.
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Post by km on Aug 7, 2010 23:36:44 GMT -5
I hate that someone who is so heartless that she can call her own daughter and grandchildren’s inhuman living conditions "hilarious" can look so benign. I bet if her inner ugliness was reflected in her outer appearance, she wouldn’t have so many under her thrall. Then again, the Pearl guy scares the crud out of me and he seems to have enough followers. See, I sorta think it does come across. She is as creepy on video as Bill Gothard. She kind of screams megalomaniac too. I mean, I too was scoffing at her ideas, but I was more taken aback by her weird way of talking to a pseudo-reporter without ever seeming to register that another human being was in the room. Probably because I was familiar enough with the scoff-worthiness of the ideas, but just wanted to see how she came across as a Human Person. She strikes me as extremely narcissistic, and also as someone who hates women in general (ah-hem, endometriosis as the "working women's disease"). And she comes across as thoroughly self-centered and oblivious to anything but the sound of her own voice... It's not hard to see how such a person could interpret Serene's suffering as "hilarious." And based on some things she says, I get the idea that these videos were not shot in 1992. As such, I would like to note that the shoulder pads and the outfit in general are kind of tragic.
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Post by km on Aug 7, 2010 21:34:02 GMT -5
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Post by km on Aug 7, 2010 21:14:30 GMT -5
Oh, ick... I just realized that the 21 year old newly married very timid girl (child of family friends) who just had a life-threatening pregnancy and has been told by doctors that she can't become pregnant again for at least another year... Well, last time I saw her, she had this CD by Serene and Pearl playing in her car: www.aboverubies.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=570:soothe-me&catid=114:music-cds&Itemid=400082I just listened to a few of the sound bites, and they kind of make me feel ill. At least the parents who led this girl into all of this have since become...slightly more tempered. When her mother told me what had happened--and what the doctor had said--I asked if that was going to be...okay given her beliefs about birth control and everything (I realize now that this was a bit prying). Her mother said, "Well, it better be, because if it isn't, I'll have to kill her husband." But I see she's in with the Campbells... I hadn't realized who they were at the time, but when I picked up the CD case, she noted that they were a couple of her "friends." This girl... It's hard to think of her as an adult woman. I remember she couldn't come into DC to see parts of the city with me when I was looking for housing there because she was afraid to ride the metro. I had hoped she wasn't as fully entrenched in all of this as she seems to be.
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Post by km on Aug 7, 2010 15:45:14 GMT -5
Also, this may be a little tangential, but I don't understand the need to publish a glossy color magazine. Why not just publish online? Particularly if you don't have the money to publish the glossy color product on paper... There are virtually no overhead costs for online publishing, particularly online publishing for small niche audiences. The faithful may even be willing to pay for online subscriptions, so...
What's with the reluctance to go digital? And could it have anything to do with their more generalized paranoia about social services and child welfare workers? Paper magazines are far more private and insulated from the public. Critics aren't going to be particularly likely to donate funds in order to receive the magazine.
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Post by km on Aug 7, 2010 7:35:40 GMT -5
From about the time I was 8, we stopped having running water in our trailer, and my uncle and grandmother just *didn't care*. Sounds similar to what I'm reading here. Wow... I'm sorry you had to live that way. That's awful.
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Post by km on Aug 7, 2010 0:31:57 GMT -5
nikita: Your mom sounds like my dad. His father died when he was 13, and he's been bitter about the fact that my sister and I have a living father ever since we passed age 13. Once, when I was trying to confront him about something awful he had done, he said, "Look, I didn't even have a father when I was your age." At the time, I almost felt tempted to say, "I might have been better off without one too."
But, anyway... He was always angry when my mother wanted to do anything for my sister and me...pretty much once we became teenagers. He was working as a teenager, so we had to. He bought his own clothes, so I bought all of my own clothes from around the age of 14 or 15 from babysitting and fast food jobs. His father had died, and his single mother hadn't been able to pay for him to go to college, so why should he support either of us after the age of 18 in any capacity?
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Post by km on Aug 7, 2010 0:10:18 GMT -5
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Post by km on Aug 7, 2010 0:04:39 GMT -5
And then of course there was Laura Silsby and her band of idiots rounding up non-orphaned children in Haiti after the earthquake. I honestly have to say I was hoping to see that woman do time in a Haitian prison. I mean, seriously??? There is such a sense of entitlement surrounding so much of what makes the news in international adoptions... With some of these folks, I think part of the allure has to do with fewer restrictions and rules. It's easier to just up and pluck children out of their own families in poor countries coping with natural disaster on a vast scale. There's so much bureaucracy to muddle through when it comes to a US adoption. It doesn't surprise me that people who are rather spectacularly entitled (such as celebrities) find this attractive.
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Post by km on Aug 6, 2010 23:46:23 GMT -5
But I just hate the whole faddishness of it in celebrity circles and also the 'pet' like attitude that seems to be apparent in some of them. It's really creepy. Are we to understand that there are absolutely no children of color in the US that would be desirable for adoption, that one must go to Africa or Guatemala to find a child when all other factors are good to go otherwise? And when I hear on the news about some of these foreign adoptions, the children aren't even orphans. They have parents and families. If one feels led somehow to go to Africa or Haiti to adopt surely there are actual orphans to choose from in those places? You don't need to raid families to find a child. Yeah, these are more or less the problems that I have with it. And I know that this isn't what happens with every family, but yeah... These things happen far too often.
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Post by km on Aug 6, 2010 23:39:24 GMT -5
In any case, I didn't realize this disrupted adoption thing was such a big problem... The case with the Russian child was the first I'd heard of it as well.
But again, I'm left thinking... What on earth did the Campbells expect to happen on adopting several children from Liberia??? I mean, not just one, but several. Blech... I just... Don't go into a situation that you don't understand--like, say, the one in Liberia--and then make it worse.
But this gets at the heart of their anti-intellectualism and support for poor education standards and just general ignorance about the world... And their cultural illiteracy, as well as a sense of entitlement when it comes to plucking kids up out of their homes without very much information or self-awareness about what they could handle... And the faith that God will transcend everything no matter what.
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Post by km on Aug 6, 2010 23:31:32 GMT -5
I agree that adopted kids shouldn't be treated like shelter dogs, but if their level of mental disturbance (and RAD is very disturbing and pretty much not curable) then that becomes a family by family issue to resolve. Especially if there are other siblings at risk in the home whose lives are going to be endangered or forever traumatized by living with the RAD child. Not everyone can handle such a drastic situation and there are cases of child abuse and murder by parents who adopted RAD children and simply could no longer cope in that extreme situation. So I won't pass judgment too quickly there. The Russian boy sent back alone with a note was ridiculous though - no excuse for that particular action on the mother's part. But why are these children just handed off to parents who clearly lack the patience and resources to deal with issues like this? It's lovely to think that God will just transcend everything, I guess, but we do all have histories that shape us, and... Argh... Yeah, the Campbells need to be honest about this.
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Post by km on Aug 6, 2010 23:27:19 GMT -5
Apparently disrupted adoptions are disturbingly common when the children are older. I'm not sure what to think about those situations. On the one hand, KM, you're absolutely right that children are not shelter dogs, and it's only going to hurt the children even more if their supposed forever-parents don't want to be their parents anymore. On the other hand, I can envision situations where the parents are completely unable to handle the child's issues, and the child might actually be better off elsewhere. My local paper ran an interesting, though somewhat disturbing article about disrupted adoptions here. I'm inclined to think the parents in the article were to blame--they should have realized they were likely to get seriously disturbed kids, and they should have been willing to take the professionals' advice about how to deal with their kids, but if they were going to insist on being punitive about RAD symptoms, they probably weren't the right parents for those kids anyway. I... I just don't understand agencies adopting to parents like this in the first place.
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Post by km on Aug 6, 2010 23:26:17 GMT -5
Not to get too sidetracked but what really sickens me is the sheer number of African American children languishing in foster care while everyone rushes to Africa to find black children to adopt. Now, if the local social services is of the old opinion that black children can only be adopted by black families then I'll give local folks a pass. But that isn't true of all geographical areas and certainly isn't true of celebrities in the news the last decade or so. Sorry, it just pisses me off. Yes, orphans from war-torn Liberia are in a terrible straight. But so are orphans in war-torn Los Angeles. Hey, Nikita, just be aware that there are international adopting parents on this forum, I think. It bothers me as well. I get what you're saying, but in addition... The colonial attitudes surrounding the celebrity Adopt from Africa project are awful. There's the Jessica Simpson story about her family's one-week mission trip to Tanzania when she was a teenager. They volunteered at an orphanage, and she picked up one super cute kid and said, "Can we keep it?" And there's Madonna stealing a kid out of Tanzania without the father's consent... And Brangelina and... I do not like the trend. I especially do not like the trend when practiced by culturally ignorant white people in Western countries who have no idea what they're doing. I say this because I have lived in a country in Africa, and I'm a Southern American, and you know, we have this long history of treating Black Africans as pets... and this new trend is horrifying and offensive at worst, and it is simply not true that just any US upbringing is de facto superior to any African upbringing... We're bringing kids out of dysfunction and into new kinds of dysfunction, and the ability to do that is certainly a function of all kinds of privilege. But it does no service to these children when it happens this way, since they're people who have individual selves in their own right... And who are not house decorations or family pets.
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Post by km on Aug 6, 2010 23:16:10 GMT -5
I don't understand how adoption agencies allow adoptions when a person has no running water. This is a damned good point.
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Post by km on Aug 6, 2010 23:13:11 GMT -5
That's not even the issue. Disruptions do happen. The problem is that the Campbells are still strongly promoting Liberian adoptions without telling the truth about their own experiences. People should be aware that adopted children sometimes have severe issues like RAD. This disgusts me. I think international adoptions are a complicated issue in the first place, but... Ugh... This makes me feel ill. So much for a non-judgmental attitude, I guess.
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Post by km on Aug 6, 2010 23:12:02 GMT -5
It's possible that the adopted children had severe behavioural issues due to reactive attachment disorder or other problems, and the adoptions "disrupted" (that's the technical term for when they are undone because they're not working). That explanation would fit with Nancy Campbell saying they were "dangerous". However, I have little doubt that if this was the case, the Campbells' Quiverfull and patriarchal ideas nonetheless made the situation much worse than necessary. Yeah, pretty much this. And while I usually try to be polite and avoid my usual sailor's mouth 'round here, I just have to say... What the fuck are people who can't handle children with severe emotional trauma doing adopting children from Liberia The QF ideals imposed on children with behavioral/emotional issues... Seems like a recipe for abuse to me. I don't know. I seem to be having the opposite reaction to many here. The poverty/flooding issues seem to me to be issues conceivably outside the parents' control, but... But... You do not voluntarily choose to become the parent of a child and then get to change your mind. An adoptee is not a bloody shelter dog.
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Post by km on Aug 6, 2010 23:07:18 GMT -5
I want to make sure that I say that I don't condemn the family if indeed they could not handle the children. It is hard for me to even imagine a mother who could parent over a dozen children, some of whom had experienced severe trauma in their birth country, educate them all at home, and do it all without running water or central heating. I just think they went overboard on the "can-do" attitude and admitting that would be a great help to their readers. Hmm... I've gotta say that I do. You do not commit to parenting a child from a war-torn country who has presumably had a difficult life thus far--and officially become the child's parent and then get to take the kid back as if it's a difficult dog from the local shelter. This sickens me. And it suggests that they don't see adopted children as their actual children, but as pets to be picked up on a whim and then taken back to the store when they misbehave... Ugh...
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Post by km on Aug 6, 2010 23:03:49 GMT -5
Years ago I was told by this person (http://www.clarkchatter.blogspot.com/) whom I used to be friends with, that she was a part of a Yahoo group for people that have adopted from Liberia and Nancy Campbell was on the list as well. She said that Nancy Campbell sent her kids back to Liberia because they were "dangerous". When I asked if they were going let everyone know she said no, it was supposed to be hush-hush. Wow... This reminds me of that recent story that hit the news about a mother sending her adopted kid alone on a flight back to Russia saying that she "didn't want him anymore." And it's a horrible, horrible thing for adults who make a commitment to a child to do. If this is true, it needs to be made more public.
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Post by km on Aug 6, 2010 22:57:13 GMT -5
Of course, the problem may not be that they don't want to repair the lower floor. After the post-Katrina flooding in New Orleans, it was hard for people to find contractors to repair flood damage even when they had the money. This was not an isolated flood - a large swath of Tennessee was affected. And if you try ripping out the damaged stuff yourself, you risk sending mold spores swirling throughout the whole house. So I don't know if we can assume that they have chosen not to make necessary repairs or can't afford to. Yeah, these are fair points.
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Post by km on Aug 6, 2010 22:57:05 GMT -5
Does anyone want to volunteer to make the call? It would need to be someone who has access to the copy of Above Rubies in which this was published, and preferably someone who has had some contact with the Campbells. I'm outside the U.S. and have no way to get hold of a copy of Above Rubies, so I'm not in a great position to do it. I don't have access to the magazine, and I've never met the Campbells, but I do think it should be done.
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