Tuesday, June 30, 2009
When Michael Jackson Isn’t Your Birth Dad
Michael Jackson’s life and death are surreal. Part rags to riches, part excess and scandal, part talent and tragedy. One has to think that he must have carried deep woundedness to live and die as he did.
As of a short time ago, 12 suicides had been reported by despondent fans. On a recent Christian talk show some talking head said it was normal, even for Christians, to have a sense of losing an immediate family member despite knowing Jackson only as public figure. Beyond unsettling, this kind of response needs to be check and restrained. It isn’t normal. Is seriously broken.
However, I want to point you to a story lost in the story. Tabloid headlines are informing the world that Michael was not the biological father of his children. Likewise with their “mothers” were non-biological surrogates. The headlines are concerned about “who gets custody”, and the bizarre and unexpected nature of the news.
From the adoptee experience, I am wondering about the kids. If they didn’t know the details of their conception and relationship, what a brutal way to find out. Even if they did, the situation ought to lead us to explore the nature of progeny. What obligation does one generation have to the next? What rights does the new generation have in regards to their lineage?
In other words, these adopted children have neither a biological mother or father in the picture. They are even more removed, having being conceived in-vitro, and carried by a non-biological surrogate. Doesn’t it begin to feel like they are community property? Now that medicine and science has opened the possibilities, are such extremes for children moral and ethical?
Laws haven’t kept up with current adoption and reunion theory and practice. With situations like this, the laws are even more woefully inadequate.
I believe adoptees out to have a right to access their family lineage. Many adoptees have wonderful adoptive homes and families, and fully participate in them. Yet they will always remain part of a duality, having a God designed place in their biological families. Nurture does not replace nature, nor does nature replace nurture.
That requires that the laws protect the rights of adopted/embryo donated children to access their biological families when they choose, as well as know who was involved along the way. Be it test tube or surrogate.
Yet in Michigan the adoption rights movement is struggling to even gain a hearing to set parity on basic human rights for closed-era adoptees. It’s hard to imagine the laws will catch up in time.
Coming: Textpattern 4.2.0
For the techies out there, I want to give a heads up to a major release in the works for Textpattern.
Textpattern has been my my top choice for websites for sometime. Small, clean, efficient code, easy upgrades, a great community, and a philosophical design that works well both for the writer and the designer have been major draws for me.
A while back some of the coders were wooed away to other major projects. (They are good at what they do, and deserved to be offered paid jobs! Textpattern is an open source labor of love). WordPress took off, then Expression Engine, and Textpattern lost some buzz. There were a few in the community who struggled over the future development vision and process. A few spewed F.U.D that Textpattern was on its last legs. (It never was - regular solid releases continued).
What didn’t happen for a while was major changes. It was micro evolution vs macro evolution. The major rewrite was assigned to a release code named “crockery” and number at 4.1.
4.1 will never be released as such to the public. The development team evolved naturally, and decided to move ahead with major additions and rewrites along the way. A new parsing engine arrived, and now unlimited custom field support, admin side theming, variable support, multi-site support with a single install, and more have been added. Soon a shiny new Textpattern 4.2. will be released and showcase an amazingly powerful content publishing system.
You don’t have to wait. You can check it out in SVN. Just head to Textpattern.com for details.