Introduction
Part 1:  Recollection, Remembrance, and Discovery
Part 2:  That Old Time Liberal Religion
Part 3:  The First Step
Part 4:  Feminism & Fellowship

The second half of the 1970s was a time of growing tension in American society, and in my family.  We had had the first real economic crisis since the Great Depression, and people were jumpy.  Instead of blaming the changing economy, they blamed the scapegoat du jour, feminism.  Feminism took the hit for two trends that had been actually going on for most of the 20th Century.

 One of them was the return of the largest number of women to the workforce since WWII.  While it was true that feminism encouraged women who wished to work to pursue their dreams, the majority were motivated by the economy.  For every woman who went to work to to fulfill her potential there were 20 who did it to put food on the table for their families.

The more serious issue in the opinion of our neighbors that feminism was blamed for was the rising divorce rates.  I can remember riding the bus to school and all the other kids were talking about how their parents were getting divorced or had gotten divorced.  They thought we had the only parents in the neighborhood who were still together.  I couldn't bring myself to tell them that our parents were actually already on their second marriage.  They had divorced a decade earlier to beat the rush.

The real culprit was a bad model for marriage.  Marriages made in the early 20th Century were encouraged to follow an occupational model where marriage was viewed as a job with fixed rules that could not be deviated from.  This meant that nothing could be changed if the marriage wasn't working by those fixed rules.  Worse, it encouraged cheating on a spouse by equating it with what was considered the relatively minor offense of cheating on your employer.  Consequently there was an epidemic of unhappy marriages, and the divorce rate had climbing steadily since the late 1950s before starting to climb steeply in the late 1960s.  The saying, "Marry in haste, repent at leisure" was painfully true for far too many people.

Feminists pushed a partnership model of marriage, where each spouse was an equal partner able to renegotiate when things weren't working out so as to prevent getting a divorce.  It also equated cheating on a spouse with the more socially serious offense of cheating on a partner instead of cheating your boss.  Starting in the late 1960s more marriages have followed this model, and consequently the divorce rates would decline dramatically in the years to come.  But in the late 1970s things had never looked scarier to people who valued traditional marriage.

I don't know which of these pressures was getting under my adoptive mother's skin and turning her into a vindictive jerk, but something was.  She didn't like it when the sour economy which forced her to go back to work, even though she had worked until we moved to Birmingham only a few years before.  She didn't like it that her second marriage had deteriorated even further, judging from the fact that my adoptive father's coworkers had pity-dumped a multi-year stash of Playboy back issues on him that he had to hide in the basement.  She didn't like it that her hair had started to turn grey, which she was camouflaging with the new "frosted highlights" treatment.  She didn't like it that I was getting positive attention from being in the gifted program; she let everyone know that even if I was smart I would never amount to anything.  She didn't like it that I was starting to ask questions.  She took all her myriad dislikes for everything else and focused them on one target -- me.

Honestly, I found life bewildering at that point.  I was old enough that my reason was starting to kick into gear.  I could figure out logic puzzles, but the real world didn't make much sense.  And I dearly wanted it to make sense in such a way where everybody agreed with everybody else and people really loved me.  But in the real world the arguments only increased and my mother's abuse only grew more overt.

Well gosh darn it, I was going to try anyway.  Both my gifted class and my church taught that reason could and should be used to make the world better, so I was going to use it.  But it was hard to reconcile reason and misogyny, especially the virulent misogyny of my adoptive mother, who made Southern men of the 1970s look like die-hard feminists in comparison.

For instance, there was the whole question of women's role in society.   My adoptive mother staunchly defended the natural inferiority of women, and more importantly the natural superiority of white women who believed in the natural inferiority of women over those women of any race who did not believe any such thing.  This gave her a moderately high position in the hierarchy from which to look down upon others without having the responsibility that went from being at the top of the heap.  It was important to her that I uphold the anti-feminist party line.  I could not.  Much as I wanted to please her, I could not believe in something so -- dumb.  I mean, if God intended women to be less intelligent than men, why didn't He make high IQ a sex-linked trait?  But He didn't.  Therefore, He must have meant women to use the gifts He gave them.  Including the gifts He gave me.  Including my analytical mind.  Which, when I did use, people accused me of not being the kind of girl God wanted me to be.

I was only a kid, and the stress was wearing me down.  Finally, one Sunday morning after some especially vicious remarks on the way to church I could stand it no longer.  I did something I hadn't done since I was very little.  I prayed to God.  Not only that, for the first time in my life I prayed to God for a sign.  I had always thought that was selfish, but I was desperate to clear up the confusion.

Imagine my surprise when I got one.

It was the Sunday before Easter, which is Palm Sunday.  Palm Sunday, for those who haven't been to church in a while was when Jesus led a parade of his followers into Jerusalem in the hopes of making radical changes in the Establishment, hopes which were to be completely dashed by the Old Guard.  It was also the first sermon by our brand new preacher, and the first chance for most folks to meet him.

The church was packed with listeners curious to hear the new preacher.  He began by saying that he knew everyone expected to hear him speak of Big Things, but he wasn't going to do that today.  There was a minor, not really important, matter that had somehow been allowed to get out of hand which had to be addressed first.  That matter was the status of women.

He said it seemed like the women of the church, and some of the men, weren't reading their Bibles correctly.  They were focusing on the words of Jesus, but when it came to women the words of Jesus were less important than the words of Paul.  Paul had the final say on matters.

I wasn't sure who this "Paul" fellow was.  I knew the Apostles and the Old Testament figures, but I hadn't heard much of this guy.  And how could anybody's words be more important than the words of Jesus?  I thought we were the followers in Jesus Christ, not somebody else.

Now, this Paul fellow was a Christian leader who came along after Jesus was dead and started organizing Jesus' followers.  He wrote letters telling the other Christian leaders how they were supposed to interpret Jesus.  I wondered how those other Christian leaders who had actually met Jesus felt about that.

Paul had strong ideas about women's place in the church.  Ideas like:

Women should remain silent in the churches, They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.

And:

Likewise, I want women to adorn themselves with proper clothing, modestly and discreetly, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly garments, but rather by means of good works, as is proper for women making a claim to godliness. A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.

We were told that this was obviously the way Jesus wanted things to be, even though it contradicted things Jesus himself had said.  We were told that this was the way the church was going to be run from now on.  We were told that women should show their assent to the new order by not dressing up for Easter next Sunday.

I sat there in shock.  It was...

It was...

It was the biggest load of malarkey I had ever heard in my life.  I felt astounded to hear such hogwash being spoken seriously and terribly embarrassed on behalf of this grown man that he was being heard saying something so foolish in public.


I thought somebody was going to stand up and call him out for having his first sermon say such crazy and divisive things, but while I could sense the consternation nobody said anything. Now, my adoptive mom didn't sew, but I knew there were ladies who had been working on their dresses for weeks. It was a mean thing to publicly denigrate their work right before they even got to finish it. It was crass and bullying. I decided then and there the God I believed in was not mean, crass, or bullying, and anyone who said He was had just blown his credibility with me.

My adoptive mother was proudly, almost combatively, anti-crafty, so I didn't have a dog in this fight.  But I knew there were ladies for whom new clothes on Easter were important, some for showing off, but others got into the whole "rebirth and renewal" aspect.  I had also figured out that the church ladies who sewed were proxies for the church ladies who did the other jobs the congregation needed to have done, the ladies who organized the Sunday School, organized the Fellowship Hall, dusted the sanctuary, and ran the office. These were the women whose work was the real draw to come to the church who were being belittled by proxy.

I wondered what would happen if those women stopped coming?

In my naiveté I expected that even if the women didn't confront this new preacher directly, their menfolk would have some strong words with him after the service about insulting their womenfolk from the pulpit.  Dumb old me didn't realize that the men's desire to send this very message was what got the guy hired.  I would learn that lesson over time, but not that day.

That day, as I sat listening to this man stand at the pulpit and speak the most idiotic drivel I had ever heard, I had a more important lesson to learn.  He stood at the pulpit like he was some kind of authority, like he had a right to be there, but his words were not true message that Jesus had brought to Earth and died for.  Even though he looked the part, acted the part, and no one openly questioned his right to the part, I knew he was a false prophet.  That day I learned to never, EVER accept authority without question.  It didn't matter what position he held, it mattered that his words and deeds were in keeping with that position.  And if they weren't, he had no business being there.

My shock started to fade, to be replaced by an urge to giggle.  Not just giggle, but to guffaw with a transcendent sense of -- joy.  I mean, yeah, it was awful that he was up there saying this nonsense, but, as a girl named Sarah would realize in a movie that was to come out ten years later, "You have no power over me."

Never again would I accept without question anyone's authority over me.  I was liberated!  I walked out of church that day feeling blessed and euphoric in my power to do what Southern Baptists were supposed to do and decide for myself what God's words meant to me.

And that was good, because things were about to get very strange.

Coming:

Three Steps Part 6:  The New Guy

The good news is that as of this week I am no longer numb from 2016.  The bad news is that as of this week I am no longer numb from 2016.

Talk about a mixed blessing.

I'm starting to transfer my LJ posts to DW.  Great, just what I need, another task to get in the way of actually writing.

May move over here from LJ more.

 We have been extremely busy lately.  The girls have started computer-based classes at Khan Academy, which eats up my computer access.  More importantly, Brighteyes has taken the ACT.  She got a bit confused on the math section, which lowered her grade.  She only made a 34.  Out of 36.  Nobody's complaining.  She started taking duel-enrollment classes at the community college this week.  The house is so empty in the mornings now.

A teacher in my husband's department died at the start of the spring semester, and the subsequent extra work load led to him being very overworked this year.

Owl has started piano lessons.  He may have the best ears in the family for identifying notes.  Unfortunately our piano teacher seems to have retired on us.

I tried to be a laid-back Mom and let them set their own pace, but they did nothing and then complained about not being able to sleep at night while they dragged themselves around all day.  This spring I kicked them out of bed for morning exercises and meditation.  They're sleeping better as a result.  But now that schedule has to be readjusted for morning class at the college.

After watching various local classes and fitness opportunities crash and burn over the years, I was shocked to find a tiny Shotokan karate class that had been going on for six months in a neighboring town.  The children and I signed up, and I am verypleased with it.  The teacher, whose kids are also in the class, is great with the children, who are all local homeschoolers.  It's wonderful to have someone else tell my kids what to do for a change.

Shotokan karate:  in the early 20th Century schoolteacher and karate instructor Ginchin Funakoshi stripped karate down to something that could be taught to young children in a grade school classroom.  In the process he also made it very easy for non-athletic adults to pick it up as well.  It didn't catch on in Japanese schools the way he hoped it would, but it caught on like wildfire in the rest of the world.  The teaching style is meant to reward and encourage youngsters, and it does a pretty good job with anxious grownups as well.

The karate proved helpful with Brighteyes in a most unexpected way.  When we started lessons I told my kids that learning martial arts had been on my "to-do" list for a long time, and this was the first opportunity I had had in a long time.  As the date for the ACT got nearer, Brighteyes became more and more agitated, until she exploded and accused me of trying to live vicariously through her, expecting her to do all the things I had not had a chance to do.  I told her I wanted no such thing.  While I had put my other plans on hold to homeschool them, now that they were old enough to start seeing to themselves I was beginning to pursue those plans once again.  I didn't want her to pursue my dreams, I wanted her to get out of my way so I could pursue my dreams.  Surprisingly, this statement actually calmed her down quite a bit, and she even became more empathetic afterward.

That's all for now.  More later.

At the ripe old age of almost-50, I seem to be assembling my first mixtape inside my head. Which is good, because I have no idea how to put one together in real life.

My adoptive father and adoptive aunt came from there. They'd say the name, and nothing more. They'd been trained never to talk or think about it and trained their own adoptive children to do the same, but it hurt them deeply. A two-generation adopted family -- we were supposed to role models. I guess we were, if you looked beneath the surface.

The Hollywood Baby Snatcher: The sinister story of the woman who stole children and sold them to the stars

For 30 years, Georgia Tann made millions selling children. A network of scouts, corrupt judges and politicians helped her steal babies. She also targeted youngsters on their way home from school, promising them ice cream to tempt them away from their homes.

As she watched her baby coughing in her cot in a corner of her tiny apartment, Alma Sipple felt increasingly desperate.

A single mother in Tennessee, she could not afford medical care for ten-month-old Irma. Suddenly, a knock on the door heralded a turn in her fate: there stood a woman with close-cropped grey hair, round wireless glasses and a stern air.

She exuded authority as she explained she was the director of a local orphanage and had come to help. Alma rushed to show the lady her sickly child.

Examining the baby, the woman offered to pass her off as her own at the local hospital in order to obtain free treatment. She warned Alma not to accompany her, explaining: ‘If the nurses know you’re the mother, they’ll charge you.’

Lifting the child from the cot, the woman turned on her heel and disappeared. Two days later, Alma was told her baby had died.

In fact, Irma had been flown to an adoptive home in Ohio. Alma would not see her daughter again for 45 years.

For far from being her savior, the woman who had taken Irma was a baby thief.

For 30 years, Georgia Tann made millions selling children. A network of scouts, corrupt judges and politicians helped her steal babies. She also targeted youngsters on their way home from school, promising them ice cream to tempt them away from their homes.

Legal papers would be signed saying they were abandoned – most would never see their families again.

Now, her story has been revealed in a new book. After painstakingly contacting her surviving victims and a forensic search through the archives, Barbara Bisantz Raymond calculates that Tann sold more than 5,000 children – and killed scores through neglect.

During the time she ran her ‘business’, the infant mortality rate in Memphis was the highest in the country.

Tann molested some of the girls in her care and placed children with paedophiles.

She charged fees to couples desperate to be parents

Some victims were sold as underage farm hands or domestic skivvies. Others were starved, beaten and raped. The lucky ones were sold to wealthy parents, with Hollywood stars, including Lana Turner and Joan Crawford – who adopted twins Cathy and Cynthia – lining up for babies.

Some of the children were featured in magazine articles. A number were placed with families in Britain.

So, who was Georgia Tann and how did she come to ruin so many lives?

Born in Hickory, Mississippi, in 1891, her father, George, was a high court judge and her mother, Beulah, a Southern belle. Inside their lavish house, all was not well.

Tann’s father was an arrogant, domineering womanizer. From an early age, it became clear Georgia was a disappointment to her strait-laced parents.

Big-boned and broad-shouldered, she wore flannel shirts and trousers: unacceptable clothing for a woman at the time. A car accident had left her with a limp.

Social work was one of the few acceptable careers for women of Tann’s class, and despite having no empathy with the vulnerable, she saw it as an escape route from her staid home.

She developed her own theories on society. In eugenic language which would be echoed to infamous effect in Nazi Germany, she described wealthy people as ‘of the higher type’.

After getting a job at the Mississippi Children’s Home-Finding Society, she began to translate her beliefs into action.

At the time, adoption was uncommon in the USA. Tann would change that.

At first, she simply placed orphans for adoption. But soon, she realized she could make money by charging hefty fees to couples desperate to become parents.

Mothers were falsely told their newborn had died

By 1920, exploiting the lack of regulations on adoption and her father’s position as a judge, Tann began placing children she had kidnapped from poor women.

Asleep inside was pregnant Rose, who was young, poor, widowed and suffering from diabetes. Her two-year-old son, Onyx, was playing on the back porch.

Tann lured the sturdy, black-haired, brown-eyed boy into her car. Her father signed legal papers declaring Rose to be an unfit mother and Onyx an abandoned child. He was placed with an adoptive family. Rose engaged a lawyer, but was unable to regain custody.

In 1924, Tann started work at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, where she turned part-time baby snatching into big business.

‘I can still hear her steps down the hallway. She had big feet and wore black lace-up shoes,’ says a former resident at the children’s home.

‘She always went upstairs to see the babies. There would be masses of them one day. They’d be gone the next.’

Tann acquired the protection of Memphis’s corrupt and all powerful mayor, Edward Hull Crump, and eventually set up her own orphanage, at 1556 Poplar Avenue.

By then, she had met her lesbian partner, Ann Atwood Hollinsworth, who helped Tann ferry babies around the country – as far from their natural parents as possible.

Tann adopted a daughter, June, in 1922. June’s daughter, Vicci, says: ‘Mother said Georgia Tann was a cold fish; she gave her material things, but nothing else. I don’t know why she bothered to adopt her.’

By the Thirties, Tann was charging wealthy couples up to £100,000 in today’s money for babies. So, how did she arrange a steady flow of children she could sell?

In some cases, single parents would drop off their children at nursery – when they came back to collect them, they would be told they had been taken away by welfare officers.

Tann offered accommodation to children whose parents were in trouble and targeted the most beautiful infants she could find, dressing them in lace outfits to meet prospective clients.

Older children would be instructed to ‘sit on that man’s lap and call him daddy’.

Newborns were most in demand. Tann bribed maternity hospital nurses, who falsely told mothers their babies had died.

Irene Green remembers being told her baby was stillborn. ‘But I heard him cry!’ she protested. She asked to see the body, but was told it had been ‘disposed of’. In fact, Georgia’s workers had snatched the child.

Tann would falsify birth certificates

Mary Reed was a typical victim. In 1943, aged 18, she gave birth to a baby boy. She was barely conscious when she was presented with a ‘routine paper’ to sign by a woman dressed in white.

By the time Mary came round and asked for her baby, the child was in New Jersey.

She hired a lawyer but never got her child back. Tann would alter the children’s records and falsify birth certificates to make them more appealing to prospective adopters.

Their mother would be described as ‘the daughter of a doctor’ who had fallen pregnant accidentally, while the father would be ‘a medical student’.

She knocked years off the children’s age, so they appeared precocious – and to stop them being traced.

Some youngsters were accused of disappointing their adoptive families. Joy Barner was told as a teenager by her father: ‘I paid 500 dollars for you – I could have gotten a good hunting dog for a lot less. You come from the lowest scum on earth.’

She later found out she had been stolen in 1925 from a loving family living on a houseboat.

Many of the children were abused. Jim Lambert and his three siblings were taken from their mother by Tann in 1932.

The Chicago couple he was placed with divorced and Jim’s stepmother hung him up from a hook in the basement.

He and his siblings eventually traced their birth mother, only to find she had died. In her Bible, beside the names of her stolen family she had written: ‘The children of a brokenhearted mother. I have no one to love me now.’

He later said: ‘I feel angry, frustrated, as if I was cheated out of a whole lot of life.’

Billy Hale recalled being driven away from his mother, crying, in a limousine, with two women in black.

His loving adoptive parents repeatedly reassured him no such event had occurred.

Through his childhood, he suffered from seemingly motiveless rages. It was only many years later, when he researched his background, that he realised his memory was correct.

He tracked down his mother, Mollie, only to be told by her brother she had died of cancer eight years previously, calling out for her son at the end.

He was told: ‘She looked for you all her life, Bill.’

‘She was a relentless, cold-blooded demon’

By 1935, Tann had placed children in every U.S. state. A social worker who knew her says: ‘She placed with no regard to whether children would be happy in their adoptive homes. She wanted to get her hands on every child she could.’

Among the most disturbing cases are the adoptions by single men of young teenagers – Bisantz Raymond suspects they were paedophiles.

Keen to make more money, Tann began running ‘Georgia’s Christmas Baby Ads’ in the local newspaper under the headline: ‘Want a real, live Christmas present?’

A brilliant publicist, she gave lectures on adoption, arguing that adopted children ‘turn out better’ than birth children, saying: ‘Ours is a selective process. We select the child and we select the home.’

She was lauded in the national Press as ‘the foremost leading light in adoption laws’.

Eleanor Roosevelt sought her counsel regarding child welfare, and President Truman invited her to his inauguration.

But by 1940, alerted by the rising infant mortality rate in the city, some people were on to Tann.

‘She was a relentless, cold-blooded demon,’ says a paediatrician who tried to curb her. ‘She got bigger and bigger the more power she had. She was pompous and self-important, riding around in a Cadillac driven by a uniformed chauffeur. She terrorised everyone.’

By 1950, officials began a long-overdue investigation into Tann’s business. State investigator Robert Taylor reported the horror of what had taken place at Tann’s orphanage, saying: ‘Her babies died like flies.’

Infants were kept in appalling conditions in suffocating heat. Some were sedated until they could be sold. Many were ill. Some were sexually abused – Tann preyed on young girls and a male caretaker would take little boys into the woods.

A news reporter believed he saw a body being buried in the garden.

In 1945, a bout of dysentery caused the deaths of between 40 and 50 children in less than four months.

The damage suffered at Tann’s hands could never be undone

The net was closing, but Tann would evade justice. Three days before her death due to cancer, the governor of Tennessee revealed at a press conference that Tann was not the ‘angel of adoption’ she claimed to be.

He did not mention the grieving parents or dead babies, but focused on the illegal profits she had made while receiving state funding.

Conveniently for the corrupt politicians who had collaborated in her black market baby trade, Tann was too sick to be questioned about her crimes. She died in her four-poster bed at 4.20am on September 15, 1950.

What became of her victims? Many never saw their families again – after Tann’s crimes came to light, there was no attempt to return children to their rightful homes.

They were granted rights to their birth certificates and adoption records only in 1995, after a long battle. A small number were reunited with their birth mothers, but the damage they had suffered at Tann’s hands could never be undone.

Forty-five years after Tann had walked into her apartment, Alma Sipple finally found Irma, but they were unable to form a lasting relationship.

‘Only someone who has lost a child this way can know how horrible it is,’ says Alma. ‘There’s a hole in my heart that will never be filled.’

This Thanksgiving we introduced the 7yo to the classic Star Wars trilogy.  Last night he spent the last part of Return of the Jedi (you know the scenes) shouting "Bear Power!"

It's interesting how the Obama Administration is using the Lincoln Administration's playbook to handle ISIL. Both the Obama and the Lincoln Administrations insisted that their adversaries were rebel insurgents, not a legitimate state, in spite of the fact that they held huge swathes of territory where they functioned with at least a semblance of a government. And the Obama Administration's plan for dealing with ISIL is an updated version of the Lincoln Administration's Anaconda Plan.

The only thing that will defeat ISIL is the majority of Muslims rejecting conservatism. That's hard for any non-leftwing group to do. It's going to be a long war.

Q:  What do you get when you cross a bad horror movie with a bad Classic Trek plot device?

A:  Why would anyone want to know?

I feel so sorry for Capaldi, this must be a nightmare for him.  As for Gattis and Moffet, four words:  Don't they look tired?