The Faculty Lounge

Hiatus on Guatemalan Adoptions

In the midst of investigating claims of fraud, Guatemala has halted all foreign adoptions.  Since January, adoptions that were once handled by private attorneys have been handed over to a government agency. The US State Department has reported evidence of coercion and payment by attorneys, in addition to lawyers paying young women to conceive children solely for the purpose of adoption. 

This reform of adoption policy in Guatemala potentially affects over 2,300 adoptions, many of them involving American parents.  This has dramatic potential for international adoption, with an increase of adoptions from Guatemala increasing from 3 percent of off American adoptions in 1990 to 20 percent of all adoptions in 2006.

Loving v. Virginia's Mildred Loving: 1940-2008

By DIONNE WALKER for the AP:

RICHMOND, Va. - Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday.   

Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.

Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.

They had married in Washington in 1958, when she was 18. Returning to their Virginia hometown, they were arrested within weeks and convicted on charges of "cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth," according to their indictments.

The couple avoided a year in jail by agreeing to a sentence mandating that they immediately leave Virginia. They moved to Washington and launched a legal challenge a few years later.

After the Supreme Court ruled, the couple returned to Virginia, where they lived with their children Donald, Peggy and Sidney.

Richard Loving died in 1975 in a car accident that also injured his wife.

In a rare interview with The Associated Press last June, Loving said she wasn't trying to change history ? she was just a girl who once fell in love with a boy.

"It wasn't my doing," Loving said. "It was God's work."

A sad passing. 

One note on the report.  Loving is usually described as an "inter-racial" marriage case, but it even goes beyond that.  The statute in Virginia didn't ban "racially mixed marriages " as the article describes, but only some racially mixed marriages.  It made it a felony for "any white person [to] intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person [to] intermarry with a white person."  In other words, Blacks, Native Americans, Asians, or any other persons of color could marry with each other, but could not marry someone who was White.  The state's need to defend "racial integrity" as Virginia claimed fell flat because the statute was designed to preserve White racial purity exclusively.  Its one of the quintessential White supremacy cases of the era.          

-Kathleen A. Bergin

Theorizing The FLDS Case: Should Texas Terminate Parental Rights?

Harry Brighouse, a philosopher at UW Madison, has a nice post considering the question of when a state ought to terminate parental rights.  (It's based on his article, with Adam Swift, Parents' Rights and the Value of the Family.)  He proposes a two-part algorithm.  First, have the parents met the preconditions for having fundamental parental rights?  Parenting, he argues, provides the parent a particular sort of intimacy which uniquely promotes human flourishing.    But when a parent  fails to attend to the child's interests sufficiently, he or she loses her fundamental rights to parent.

This doesn't end the matter, however, because at this point the child's interest surfaces.  Once a parent has forfeited rights, the state must "ask whether terminating parental rights will, given the real institutional alternatives, be better for the kids than not doing so.  This bar, frankly, is usually pretty high, because it takes pretty serious abuse and neglect to make a child worse off than they would be in the foster care system."

Brighouse then offers three reasons why the foster care option is sketchy: first, it's disruptive to place a kid in foster care against his or her parents' wishes; second, original parents have lots of legal protections that result in kids often being shuttled back and forth between original and foster parents before any adoption can occur; and third, "some foster parents are pretty bad."

Thus, while he believes it's likely that many of the FLDS have forfeited their fundamental parenting rights, he's uncomfortable how matters play out with respect to the second prong: the childrens' best interests.  Perhaps in a different world termination might make sense, but we don't live in that world.  He concludes:

The fact that original parents have so many protections is, of course, something the State, itself, has control over (as, to some extent, is the quality of the foster care system). Maybe the state should reform the law so that children can easily and quickly be fostered-then-adopted, and original parents have little say. But for these particular children (and the courts making the decision) there is no prospect of law being reformed in that way. And there are reasons, given the history of the US into very recent times, for being very uneasy about giving State governments that sort of power given the history of the use of state power against despised groups of parents in the US.

Image of the FLDS compound courtesy of this site.