Kathy
01-03-2005, 11:06 AM
Monday, January 3, 2005
COMPLAINTS ARE MISDIRECTED
Don't blame 'Who's Your Daddy?'
The controversial TV show serves a useful purpose in reuniting adopted children
with parents
BY LORRAINE DUSKY
Lorraine Dusky is the author of "Birthmark," a memoir about surrendering her
daughter for adoption, and is the New York representative of the American
Adoption Congress.
December 27, 2004
The adoption community is outraged over an upcoming Fox TV game show called
"Who's Your Daddy?" The title pretty much reveals its premise: a woman given up
for adoption at infancy will try to pick out her birth father from a group of
eight. If she identifies him, she wins $100,000; if she chooses someone else,
he gets the cash.
Complaints are flying to Fox Broadcasting, a protest at the company's Manhattan
headquarters is scheduled before the first special even airs (on Jan. 3), and
words like "despicable," "perverse" and "money-grubbing" are making the rounds
in e-mail.
When I first heard about the show my immediate reaction was the same: How low
can "they" go?
I met my daughter - whom I had surrendered to adoption 15 years earlier - in a
busy airport in Madison, Wis., and I was glad cameras weren't rolling. Despite
the airport crowds, the experience was private.
But it was my fortune to have had the money to pay a searcher to find my
daughter. Not everyone can. Fees today can be as much as $3,000 - or more. And
for some the usual methods of underground searching go down blind alleys and
dead ends. For a fortunate few in the whole scope of search and reunion, TV
producers willing to pay for private investigators provided a welcome boon.
"Who's Your Daddy?" is not really so different from the hundreds of birth
parent-adopted child reunions that found favor - and huge audiences - when
Oprah, Geraldo Rivera, Maury Povich and Sally Jesse Raphael made them happen in
front of a live audience and broadcast to millions.
Adoptee-rights activists - birth parents and adopted people - not only went
along with them but actively participated, often appearing on the set to argue
for opening sealed birth records. The shows evoked tears, sometimes
recriminations, but no one doubted that they were powerful TV. Got you right in
the gut.
So what makes this one so seemingly offensive? It's undoubtedly the money
prize, the reality-game-show element, and the provocative title that pushes
"Who's Your Daddy?" over the taste edge.
Yet, in putting eight shows together, producers reunited three dozen pairs of
daughters searching for their fathers, and fathers searching for their
daughters. A good thing. No matter whom the contestant chose - one's father or
not - she was reunited with the father she had been seeking. Also a good thing.
According to the show's advance publicity, even the Teamsters on the set were
misty-eyed during the filming. Another good thing, because it demonstrates that
we all, even supposedly hard-boiled types, are sensitive to one of the great
tragic stories of all time: loss and reunion.
"Who's Your Daddy?" takes that theme and plays it as a three-ring circus, but
the theme is still there: Loss of a child is devastating; reunion is elevating.
The great hope in the '80s and '90s was that the rash of TV reunions would lead
to the rollback of archaic state laws that took away the right of adopted
people to know their true origins, the ones that began before adoption. Adopted
adults and birth parents were saying as loudly as they could that these laws
were based on the false premise that adopted people did not need to know their
own heritage, and that birth parents never looked back.
But neither time and distance, nor all the love in the world from an adoptive
family, can kill the need to know - whether you are looking forward about your
progeny, or backward about your heritage. Without this knowledge, adopted
people are unable to know how and where they fit into the family tree of life.
Birth mothers and, obviously, some fathers are like trees with sawed-off limbs
they go on seeking. There is an old saying in Italian that means "Blood seeks
blood." It is the way of the world, always has been, always will be. But we in
America have long pretended this wasn't true.
So what's perverse is not the show itself, but that it's still contemporary,
that people adopted as infants are denied the most basic information about
themselves: Who am I?
What's despicable is that legislators, numerous adoption agencies and adoption
lawyers, many Catholic Charities agencies, the Church of the Latter Day Saints
- even some local ACLU chapters - are blinded on this issue, and rush to
"protect" people from their own offspring. If it takes something as seemingly
vulgar as "Who's Your Daddy?" to make the scales fall from their eyes, bring it
on. Those in the adoption community who find the show profane should direct
their anger at the real source of the problem - the outdated laws - and demand
our legislators grant equality for those among us who are now less than equal.
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-b4097276dec27,0,7169712.story?coll=
ny-viewpoints-headlines
Kathy
COMPLAINTS ARE MISDIRECTED
Don't blame 'Who's Your Daddy?'
The controversial TV show serves a useful purpose in reuniting adopted children
with parents
BY LORRAINE DUSKY
Lorraine Dusky is the author of "Birthmark," a memoir about surrendering her
daughter for adoption, and is the New York representative of the American
Adoption Congress.
December 27, 2004
The adoption community is outraged over an upcoming Fox TV game show called
"Who's Your Daddy?" The title pretty much reveals its premise: a woman given up
for adoption at infancy will try to pick out her birth father from a group of
eight. If she identifies him, she wins $100,000; if she chooses someone else,
he gets the cash.
Complaints are flying to Fox Broadcasting, a protest at the company's Manhattan
headquarters is scheduled before the first special even airs (on Jan. 3), and
words like "despicable," "perverse" and "money-grubbing" are making the rounds
in e-mail.
When I first heard about the show my immediate reaction was the same: How low
can "they" go?
I met my daughter - whom I had surrendered to adoption 15 years earlier - in a
busy airport in Madison, Wis., and I was glad cameras weren't rolling. Despite
the airport crowds, the experience was private.
But it was my fortune to have had the money to pay a searcher to find my
daughter. Not everyone can. Fees today can be as much as $3,000 - or more. And
for some the usual methods of underground searching go down blind alleys and
dead ends. For a fortunate few in the whole scope of search and reunion, TV
producers willing to pay for private investigators provided a welcome boon.
"Who's Your Daddy?" is not really so different from the hundreds of birth
parent-adopted child reunions that found favor - and huge audiences - when
Oprah, Geraldo Rivera, Maury Povich and Sally Jesse Raphael made them happen in
front of a live audience and broadcast to millions.
Adoptee-rights activists - birth parents and adopted people - not only went
along with them but actively participated, often appearing on the set to argue
for opening sealed birth records. The shows evoked tears, sometimes
recriminations, but no one doubted that they were powerful TV. Got you right in
the gut.
So what makes this one so seemingly offensive? It's undoubtedly the money
prize, the reality-game-show element, and the provocative title that pushes
"Who's Your Daddy?" over the taste edge.
Yet, in putting eight shows together, producers reunited three dozen pairs of
daughters searching for their fathers, and fathers searching for their
daughters. A good thing. No matter whom the contestant chose - one's father or
not - she was reunited with the father she had been seeking. Also a good thing.
According to the show's advance publicity, even the Teamsters on the set were
misty-eyed during the filming. Another good thing, because it demonstrates that
we all, even supposedly hard-boiled types, are sensitive to one of the great
tragic stories of all time: loss and reunion.
"Who's Your Daddy?" takes that theme and plays it as a three-ring circus, but
the theme is still there: Loss of a child is devastating; reunion is elevating.
The great hope in the '80s and '90s was that the rash of TV reunions would lead
to the rollback of archaic state laws that took away the right of adopted
people to know their true origins, the ones that began before adoption. Adopted
adults and birth parents were saying as loudly as they could that these laws
were based on the false premise that adopted people did not need to know their
own heritage, and that birth parents never looked back.
But neither time and distance, nor all the love in the world from an adoptive
family, can kill the need to know - whether you are looking forward about your
progeny, or backward about your heritage. Without this knowledge, adopted
people are unable to know how and where they fit into the family tree of life.
Birth mothers and, obviously, some fathers are like trees with sawed-off limbs
they go on seeking. There is an old saying in Italian that means "Blood seeks
blood." It is the way of the world, always has been, always will be. But we in
America have long pretended this wasn't true.
So what's perverse is not the show itself, but that it's still contemporary,
that people adopted as infants are denied the most basic information about
themselves: Who am I?
What's despicable is that legislators, numerous adoption agencies and adoption
lawyers, many Catholic Charities agencies, the Church of the Latter Day Saints
- even some local ACLU chapters - are blinded on this issue, and rush to
"protect" people from their own offspring. If it takes something as seemingly
vulgar as "Who's Your Daddy?" to make the scales fall from their eyes, bring it
on. Those in the adoption community who find the show profane should direct
their anger at the real source of the problem - the outdated laws - and demand
our legislators grant equality for those among us who are now less than equal.
http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/ny-b4097276dec27,0,7169712.story?coll=
ny-viewpoints-headlines
Kathy
