Governor Patrick is expected to announce his support early this week for licensing three gambling casinos in Massachusetts. Given the state’s desperate financial situation, this probably is not a big surprise, especially since a powerful Democrat like Tom Menino already has made his support a matter of public record.
Earlier this month, the governor signed into law a bill, SB 63, that would give certain adoptees the right to obtain copies of their original birth certificates.
This bill is the result of ten years of hard work on the part of its sponsors. It is not a perfect bill, it is a compromise following Romney’s pocket veto last year of a less restrictive bill; adoptees born in the Commonwealth between July 17,1974 and January 1, 2008 still have to jump through the same hoops to get access to their real birth certificates as all of us did before.
As a result, some open adoption advocacy groups like Bastard Nation are infuriated by this bill, and rightly so. They call it correctly: any initiative to provide adoptees with access to information about their families is a threat to the 6.7 BILLION dollar adoption agency business.
Putting that gigantic number into perspective, that’s the same as the total of one year’s revenue from gambling in Las Vegas, or one dollar for every human being on planet Earth. It is a number that definitely catches the attention of legislators and even candidates for the Presidency.
Still, the fact that Massachusetts has even the semblance of an open adoption law on the books is a minor miracle. The ethnic and religious composition of Massachusetts is unique. Culturally, it retains many of the malevolent, vindictive attitudes toward “children without a name” that have disappeared in other parts of the country, including Alaska, Oregon, Kansas, Alabama and two other New England states, Maine and New Hampshire.
I am hopeful that over time, the restrictions in SB 63 will be eliminated, either through court action or through legislation.