| Yawning
Bread. 4 April 2008
The children we leave behind
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At least he has an orphanage to live in. Baan Kingkaew in Chiangmai, Thailand, feeds him, cares for him and will eventually ensure that he goes to school. Millions in even poorer countries are just left on the streets to fend for themselves. Baan Kingkaew was founded in 1966 by a group of women, Thai and expatriate, who came to know each other through their voluntary work at Chiang Mai University Hospital. Ms Kingkaew Wiboolsanti donated her home, land and a financial endowment to kick start the orphanage, which, as you can see, is named in her honour. It currently houses up to 50 boys and girls up to age 5 whose parents have either died or disappeared and who have no other family to take them in. When the children reach the age of 6, they are transferred to another facility a short distance away -- a kind of boarding school.
For a long while, Baan Kingkaew was an entirely privately-run foundation. Even now, it has to raise much of its own funding, not least to pay for its 39 staff who provide round-the-clock attention to the children. The Thai government merely subsidises the cost of food and clothing and does not pay for staff, according to Praneet Swasdiraksa, a spritely 84-year-old who heads the orphanage. It only costs 4,000 – 5,000 Baht (about S$200) a year to support a child but it requires a constant effort to keep raising the needed money. Compounding the tragedy is the skewed distribution of desire for children and availability. Many people in developed countries have the wherewithal and the wish for children, but who cannot conceive or who are disallowed by all sorts of laws from adopting. One such attempt to smuggle a baby out of Thailand (but not from her orphanage) triggered some new and more onerous regulations some years ago, Praneet said.
Plenty of single people are perfectly capable of loving and raising children, as a dispassionate review of social history through the centuries will reveal. More recently, evidence is coming up that gay couples are just as capable: The children they raise are just as well adjusted as children raised in more traditional settings. So why are children still in orphanages? Wouldn't it be better to grow up with one parent than to have none at all? Why is it so important to deny single people the right to adopt? Why are gay people still considered unfit to be parents? * * * * * These opponents never present any credible evidence that gay parents as a class are unfit -- for the simple reason that there is no such evidence. All there is is a bunch of assertions drawn from various starting assumptions (usually religiously inspired) about moral failings, and elaborated with stereotypes and panic-stricken imagination. In answer to this, the bishops and others will ask: Prove to us that gay parents are fit and that children do not suffer. No, we don't have to prove, and the state should not require it. The nature of freedom and the human right to family life is such that to stop someone from having children, it's for the state to prove unfitness, not for the individual to prove his fitness, let alone for an entire class of persons to prove it. After all, any female can get herself bonked and give birth to a child. Any heterosexual petty thief can marry a scam artist in a state-sanctioned ceremony and have 7 children, and then leave her. We would do better to focus on making sure no child is neglected than making sure that only (temporarily)-married heterosexuals can have children. Meeting the latter objective is quite different from meeting the former. * * * * *
And still we raise another generation of social fascists. On the left is a poster I saw outside a pre-school here in Singapore. It advertises a children's art competition that was held at the Botanic Gardens on 22 March 2008 with the theme, "How do I know Daddy and Mummy love each other?" It's an event that is part of a larger theme, "In Celebration of 'We are married'." Suggestions given to the children in the fine print of the poster include, "I know Daddy loves Mummy because he helps her clean the dishes" and "I know Mummy loves Daddy when she prepares his favourite food". It is bad enough that these suggestions set out to reinforce gender roles: It's the woman's job to cook and to wash up, and if the man is in the right (loving) mood, he might just deign to help out. But what about children who do not have a father AND mother living with them? How excluded are they going to feel when Teacher tells them about the art event? Did no one who designed that competition think that maybe there would be a child (or two or three) in a pre-school who doesn't come from a cookie-cutter family? All of a sudden, these kids see their own family arrangements in a negative light, even though they are loved and treasured. All of a sudden, their self-esteem is cut down. They don't fit. They don't measure up. They and their families are wierdos in some way. How can we, in our thoughtlessness, leave children behind this way? And so the process of norm-formation
begins. This is good and that is bad. Privileged kids from these families are
taught to feel somehow superior, starting them young on the road to becoming another
generation of enforcers of social fascism. © Yawning Bread
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Footnotes None Addenda None
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This picture is a very sad one, for this boy lives in an orphanage. It is
an atrocity that children are left without loving families. Can you
imagine how difficult it must be for a child to grow up whole when such
are the conditions of one's formative years?
But not only are there barriers to
cross-border adoptions -- often motivated partly by nationalistic or
ethno-centric reasons -- there are also barriers to who, even within the
same country, are permitted to adopt. While there is a case for rules to
ensure that adopters are fully capable of looking after the child, too
often these rules are anchored in old, unexamined notions of a
heterosexual marriage as the only viable basis for child-raising.
