Legislation, News January 29, 2020

Wisconsin’s SB521/AB579 Will be Amended with Restrictions

by Marley Greiner

WMOT Radio, Manitowoc
January 20, 2020, interview with sponsor Paul Tittl. SB521/AB579 will be amended with restrictions.

The reasoning behind these bills is murky at best. Why not release the OBC, which is what people actually want and is the political keystone of the Adoptee Rights Movement, and add other court documents to the bundle? Why is OBC secrecy sacred to the state?

Moreover, due to past experience, local critics did not trust the bill’s sponsors to keep this even-flawed legislation free of vetoes and redactions.

After Sunday’s publication of a joint letter to appropriate Senate and Assembly committees from five adoptee rights organizations, (including Bastard Nation) asking members to reject the bill, adoptee rights deformist Rich Urhlaub posted on his FB page

AONN myopia strikes again. They want to deny WI adoptees the names of their birthparents because the bill as introduced provides them on a different document. SMH. 

As if something is wrong with asking for what you actually want, not what you might get—and refusing to take anything less. Imagine how that would have worked with woman suffrage.

Rights are not desires. Obviously nobody but politicians and a handful of special interests want to “deny adoptees the names of their birthparents.”  We wonder, though, why anyone claiming to be in the movement would want to substitute a routine court document for the OBC—the state-generated record of our births—a document that is issued to the Not Adopted with no government-mandated third-degree.

Rights are not reunions. Continued deformist “baby steps’ endorsements hinder the restoration of rights and OBC unsealing and make the movement a laughing stock.

Evidently, neither Urlaub nor supporters of the bills bothered to listen to this interview with Rep Tittl or find it online later. BN posted a link to it on our Wisconsin State page on January 26 for our weekly legislative updates. The interview, after the fact, was mentioned on the Adoptee Equal Rights Task Force Wisconsin Facebook page, but Tittl’s promise of “amendments” was not.  Or maybe they don’t care that the bills continue to abrogate their own rights.

So here it is, right in Rep. Tittl’s voice: birthparent opt-out.

Can it be any clearer?

Kill the bill!

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