Nov-17-2007 14:11
Oregon Human Services: Today's Gestapo?
Commentary by Neal Feldman Salem-News.com
Is it in a child's best interests to always be placed in a family that is more affluent?
Image of Gabriel Allred
constitutionallyright.com
(SALEM, Ore.) - No wonder Gestapo CPS continues to get away with the attacks on families that it constantly perpetrates. There is clearly a very vocal contingent in this country to whom the concept of family and blood relations are meaningless.
This is the "Best Interests of the Child" crowd ... but of course what is REALLY in a given child's best interests are entirely up for debate.
Is it in a child's best interests to always be placed in a family that is more affluent? If so then all children of families on welfare or in the lower income brackets are up for grabs to any parents who want to adopt them if these adoptive parents are more affluent than the family the child is currently with. That would be an extremely perilous road to start down.
The current case celeb in the news is that of 2-year old Gabriel Allred, born in Oregon to a drug addict mother and sexual predator father. DHS in this case rightly terminated the parental rights in one of the rare cases that the parents were actually abusive and harmful to the child. And again in one of the rare instances DHS is uniting the child with its blood family, in this case a grandmother in Mexico.
But the foster parents, Steve and Angela Brandt of Toledo, Oregon, southwest of Salem near the coastal town of Newport, who have admitted they became foster parents for Gabriel in the hopes of adopting him, are fighting this every step of the way, and they have no small number of supporters.
To put no dull point on it these are kidnappers. They are holding this child hostage to their needs and wants. They could not care less what is 'in the best interests of the child'.
Far too many people become foster parents not to provide safe temporary homes for the kids placed in their charge but in a deranged form of meat market as they seek kids to steal for themselves.
Such fosters routinely undermine reunification and drag separation out as long as they can so that they can claim to have 'bonded' with the kids and to put forth this claim as justification to terminate the rights of the real parents so that the fosters can then adopt.
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This is why I favor a law barring any foster parent from ever adopting a child that was placed in their care. It would eliminate the meat market aspect entirely.
If a kid's parents lose custody and the kid goes up for adoption so be it... to anyone but those they were in foster care with. It is far too great a temptation for fosters who wish to adopt their charges to undermine reunification to their own benefit. And this happens with far more regularity than most would comfortably like to believe.
They argue that they are the only family he knows. In the case of little Gabriel, it is quite true since he is only 2-years old and they have gone to great lengths to make sure this was the case. But just because some kidnapper snatches an infant and holds them for a couple years we do not let them keep the kid 'because they have bonded'. Gabriel is 2-years old. He will bond to the grandmother too.
Supporters of the Brandts have accused the grandmother of only wanting the $375 per month taxpayer provided stipend, but it is interesting to note that the grandmother was entirely unaware of this stipend when she sought custody of the boy the moment she learned of his situation. And yes he was several months old when she finally learned of it because she is not a mindreader and to my knowledge has never claimed to be. And why are the Brandts not accused of 'just being in it for the check'? It seems quite the one sided argument.
But as the saying goes... those who refuse to learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.
We seem to have learned nothing from the media circus that was Elian Gonzalez.
He, too, had blood relatives, in this case his Cuban father wanted his son back. and after years of orchestrated BS on the part of the would be kidnappers of Elian he was, eventually, at gunpoint, returned to his father.
Will we need to send in SWAT teams to get Gabriel too?
And we have Senator Gordon Smith and Governor Ted Kulongoski, proving that neither political party respects the concept of family rights, trying to force DHS to do that which its own rules preclude it doing - placing the child in a family other than blood relations if an acceptable blood relation is willing to take in the child.
Government officials doing their able best to interfere in private family matters and in the process trampling their entire concept of family rights.
Does the name Terri Schiavo not still ring in peoples' ears? Another case where government officials, and others, sought to step into personal private family matters where they had no legitimate business doing so. That case was in Florida. This case is in Oregon.
Different stage, different players, same old anti-family song and dance.
Gabriel is a US citizen by birth, with dual citizenship (he is also a Mexican citizen) If placed with the grandmother when he is an adult he will have every right, if he so chooses to exercise it, to re-enter the US.
But as a 2-year old child he belongs with his family. And in this case his family is his grandmother in Mexico. It most certainly is not the babysnatching Toledo couple Steve and Angela Brandt.
In one of the rare instances Gestapo CPS actually has it right and should be allowed to do what its own rules state it must do without politically postured interference from outsiders who seek only to turn this case into another media circus.
If Steve and Angela Brandt want a kid why don't they have one the old fashioned way instead of trying to steal a child from another family?
Much is made of the mother and father of Gabriel supporting the Brandts. Hmmmm... a crack whore and a predatory sexual deviant deemed unfit to be parents and stripped of all rights regarding Gabriel. Why should anyone care a whit what they think? If they had even half a clue the entire situation would not exist.
Send Gabriel to the grandmother. If she has any sense she will get a restraining order against the Brandts keeping them from having any contact with Gabriel ever again. In 2 years Gabriel will have entirely forgotten them as he bonds with his real family.
As it should be.
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