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New Jersey- Governor Christie gives S799/A1399 a conditional veto

Yesterday New Jersey Governor Chris Christie conditionally vetoed NJCare’s botched S799/A1399 bill, offering up his own set of recommendations that draw on both the disastrous NJ CARE bill and the NJ ACLU/Catholic Conference/Right to Life alternative bill. (Neither bill stood firm for authentic Bastard rights.)

Thus Governor Christie, in attempting to sew together bits and pieces from both bad bills offers up a Frankenstein’s monster of his own construction. In the Governor’s offered “substitute” he displays clearly just how deeply he fails to understand the core premises of Bastard equality, genuine protections for women’s authentic medical privacy, and respect for us and our families.

Read his substitute for yourself, and then compare it to everything I’ve written over the past several years about what a genuine adoptee rights bill for New Jersey would and would not entail.

His Substitute fails by every measure.

Moreover, it would create a legislative mess practically guaranteed to please no one, leading all factions right back to the drawing board and forcing them to begin this legislative epic all over again beginning next session. Far from “dealing with the issue” or “putting it to rest” the Governor’s substitute opens the road to nothing but further legislative struggle and potential lawsuits.

Those so set on “doing SOMETHING” (ANYTHING, it seems) rather than the right thing, merely open yet a next chapter in the battle for authentic adoptee rights, and sentence countless Bastards and our families to yet more years of unjust treatment.

There is nothing complicated or convoluted about authentic adoptee rights. I’ll spell it out in the simplest of terms yet again:

  • Bastards and our families used to enjoy enqual status under law to non-adopted New Jersey natives.
  • The state and various private interests then did us a terrible wrong by constructing a system of unequal treatment specifically set aside for class Bastard, the original documentation pertaining to our births (i.e our original birth certificates/ OBCs) and our families.
  • Now decades later, as states begin to readdress that injustice done to us, the only genuine goal behind adoptee rights legislation must be to restore what we once enjoyed, full equality to any other person born in that state, in this case, New Jersey.

Anything less is not justice.

Anything less simply perpetuates the systems of discrimination we have suffered under for decades now.

Furthermore,  any new efforts to, for example compel our mothers to divulge their otherwise legally protected private medical histories to the state in an ongoing effort to maintain dossiers on them, is merely further abuses heaped upon our familes under the false pretext of granting adopted people something no other person is entitled to.

What authentic adoptee rights advocates demand is extremely simple: we want the same rights and protections for ourselves and our families that any other person born in a state is granted. No special treatment, no special files, no mandated confidential intermediary systems run through adoption agencies, etc.

We expect nothing less than the same constitutionally protected right to freedom of association, and access to the authentic documentation pertaining to our births that the non-adopted currently enjoy.

In other words, we want what Governor Christie, for example already has.

Anything less simply perpetuates the structures of injustice and interference in our families personal lives that adoptees currently endure.

Anyone willing to settle for merely adding another chapter to these injustices, is clearly no friend to Bastards, our families, our our human rights.

The Governor’s “substitute” adds insult to injury, nothing more.


For more, see Bastardette’s New Jersey: What is a Conditional Veto? and ‘stay tuned to her blog for her further analysis.

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