Jill, Derick and Israel- Part 16

[formergothardite]

36 minutes ago, Palimpsest said:

Unless they think that it is seriously empowering and amazeballs that Erin gets to play the piano, teach a few Fundies, and make a CD now she's married and a mother, I'm missing something.  I'm sure she had to get Chad's permission.

So, do they have a women's empowerment ministry too?

They are giving lectures of female empowerment. I haven't been able to find any info about what they are actually saying, but I'm just going to go with not really empowering women.

[nst]

24 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

They are giving lectures of female empowerment. I haven't been able to find any info about what they are actually saying, but I'm just going to go with not really empowering women.

i know nothing about erin - but I would listen to chad more than I would listen to Ben 

he seems to be nicer than Ben 

[Palimpsest]

33 minutes ago, foreign fundie said:

As for 'the bad ones' you mention, I suppose that this is possible, especially for larger NGO's. However I have not come across this particular abuse. I suppose because most missionaries 1) are not interested in making money (most I know make much less than they could make in a regular job) 2) they don't know how to do it.

 

You should look into any charitable organization, big or small, to see how much of the money you donate actually goes to the people you mean to help.  It is reasonable to spend about 15 - 25% on administration/fundraising costs/and overhead.  What people's personal cut-off point for organizations they want to support on that may vary.

Most of the missionaries I know, and certainly my family members, were/are not in it for the money.  They were also not fly-by-night IFB-types without a clue what they are doing - except fundraising so they can go to convert Christians to the right kind of Christianity.  

Quote

I know none of these projects that even break even. The sale usually covers only part of what the women get paid and none of the shipping, distribution and marketing. Also you need to have a pretty good network and be a savvey business person to make real money off non-professionally, small scale souvenir production.

SOS and the Dillards certainly don't seem to know how they can help the local people build a sustainable business. The model you describe here is rubbish.  Disempowering rubbish too.  Enabling not empowering. 

Here's an example of a good organization and a good model.  It started out very small and is still small, in the greater scheme of things.  It may not be perfect, but it is a darn sight better than what you describe.  Also note that it has the annual report and review are right there on the website.  https://www.farmafrica.org/about/about-us  

Here is an article about another project for women: http://www.meda.org/youth-team-blog/entry/growing-entrepreneurs-growing-opportunities-for-generations-to-come

I realize that you are seeing this through rose colored glasses but wake up!  Give a man a fish ...

BTW, SOS Ministries never got back to me to answer my very polite request for clarification and more information about their water projects in Africa.  They didn't send me a copy of their annual report either.  They don't want informed donors, obviously.  That puts them straight onto my scammers list.  They are funding voluntourism and supporting their grifters not helping anyone. 

Quote

Therefore, my guess? Sos make zero money with this. Let alone the Dillards. They can however use (pictures of) the program itself for their marketing.

If all they want to do is church plant, fine.  I won't fund it.  But don't pretend to have a ministry helping women in business and use those photos for marketing.  That is false and deceptive and a scam.

 

25 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

They are giving lectures of female empowerment. I haven't been able to find any info about what they are actually saying, but I'm just going to go with not really empowering women.

Jesus wept.  So will I! 

[formergothardite]

4 minutes ago, nst said:

i know nothing about erin - but I would listen to chad more than I would listen to Ben 

he seems to be nicer than Ben 

I'm sure Chad will sound nicer when speaking about faux women empowerment, but no way he will actually be talking about empowering women. 

 

4 minutes ago, Palimpsest said:

BTW, SOS Ministries never got back to me to answer my very polite request for clarification and more information about their water projects in Africa.  They didn't send me a copy of their annual report either.  They don't want informed donors, obviously.  That puts them straight onto my scammers list.  They are funding voluntourism and supporting their grifters not helping anyone. 

That is a major red flag right there. They have stuff to hide. One thing I have noticed with a lot of these IFB "missionaries" is that there is absolutely no way to figure out their finances or how much money is going to the missionaries to support their lives compared to how much money is going to actual mission work. 

[Snarkylark]

56 minutes ago, Four is Enough said:

 

 

Part three: This, especially the bolded. The birth parents are not part of the child's daily life in a meaningful way. And for Three and Four, their parental rights had been terminated by the State... so their birth certificates would have "birth parents", then "State of Maryland", Then us! Little too much information and too cumbersome.

 

This is kind of my point. What does a certificate of live birth have to do with parental rights? It's a document detailing the situation at birth. You don't change the place and city of birth on the document. Certainly there are other documents involved in the termination of parental rights and then the adoption. I don't see why birth certificates are changed. I still believe a child has a right to that information. 

[nst]

Just now, formergothardite said:

I'm sure Chad will sound nicer when speaking about faux women empowerment, but no way he will actually be talking about empowering women. 

 

 

good to know  

[RoseWilder]

3 hours ago, Palimpsest said:

It is also a pretty shitty thing for an adoptive family to sign an open adoption agreement if they have no intention of honoring it.  Or to change their minds after the adoption is final because honoring it is inconvenient and they want birth mom out of their lives.   Luckily those adoptive parents seem to be in the minority and most seem to honor the agreement..   

I agree that it's a horrible thing to do. I wasn't saying in my post that I agreed with adoptive parents doing that. I'm appalled when people do that. 

[Four is Enough]

1 hour ago, RoseWilder said:

I agree that it's a horrible thing to do. I wasn't saying in my post that I agreed with adoptive parents doing that. I'm appalled when people do that. 

Re: not honoring an open adoption agreement. 

I actually know adoptive parents who went to Chile twice for their children. The reason? They didn't want "birth parents showing up at their door." Pretty shitty IMO. While dealing with (three different) birth families can be messy and emotional, I HOPE it works out for the best for all my kids.

[Lillymuffin]

On May 25, 2016 at 1:17 PM, nausicaa said:

Are you me? Anyway, get your booty over to the Single Ladies thread NikeSeamstress so we can commiserate. 

And yeah, the whole, "my friends moved forward and married and I'm the last single one" is a really hard position for several reasons and I don't think our society talks enough about it. 

This is a thread I definitely need. I'm the last singleton in my group of friends and in my family (of marriageable age). Is it in one of the hidden-until-75-post areas? I'm not having any luck finding it. 

[nausicaa]

1 hour ago, Lillymuffin said:

This is a thread I definitely need. I'm the last singleton in my group of friends and in my family (of marriageable age). Is it in one of the hidden-until-75-post areas? I'm not having any luck finding it. 

Yep, it's in Are You There Free Jinger. Keep posting and you'll have access to it!

[Lillymuffin]

Well, I'm halfway there anyway. Never thought I'd say I need to snark more!! 

[Jinder Roles]

4 hours ago, nst said:

i know nothing about erin - but I would listen to chad more than I would listen to Ben 

he seems to be nicer than Ben 

Sometimes 'nice' is very dangerous.

[anotherone]

5 hours ago, foreign fundie said:

As for 'the bad ones' you mention, I suppose that this is possible, especially for larger NGO's. However I have not come across this particular abuse. I suppose because most missionaries 1) are not interested in making money (most I know make much less than they could make in a regular job) 2) they don't know how to do it. I know none of these projects that even break even. The sale usually covers only part of what the women get paid and none of the shipping, distribution and marketing. Also you need to have a pretty good network and be a savvey business person to make real money off non-professionally, small scale souvenir production.

Therefore, my guess? Sos make zero money with this. Let alone the Dillards. They can however use (pictures of) the program itself for their marketing.

To really help financially, microloans are much more effective.  The concept originally was to help poor women start up businesses by loaning them very small amounts in groups of four.  They all have to be responsible for the loan so peer pressure among the group of 4 pushes all of them to pay back the money.  Examples of successes are one woman bought a cow and sold milk in the mornings.  Another bought a pot and bowls and sold soup on the street corner.  Those kinds of things.  Making a bunch of bracelets and shipping them to another continent where there is such an excess of that kind of stuff is probably just for show.

[ophelia]

24 minutes ago, Jinder Roles said:

Sometimes 'nice' is very dangerous.

Very very dangerous. And most times it is just shitty.

I can totally see why Chad seems "nicer" - he seems to really care about Erin up to a certain point - her taking the pill or getting a job or running for an office wouldn't be something he would approve of or support in any way. He is a few years older than Ben and comes from an IBLP royalty family. He knows how to sell the image of a sweet and tender husband while actually total buying the whole female submission crap. Ben is a kid. He's immature, has no education and just wasn't "trained" the way Chad was.

[SassyPants]

6 minutes ago, ophelia said:

Very very dangerous. And most times it is just shitty.

I can totally see why Chad seems "nicer" - he seems to really care about Erin up to a certain point - her taking the pill or getting a job or running for an office wouldn't be something he would approve of or support in any way. He is a few years older than Ben and comes from an IBLP royalty family. He knows how to sell the image of a sweet and tender husband while actually total buying the whole female submission crap. Ben is a kid. He's immature, has no education and just wasn't "trained" the way Chad was.

He is eight years older than Ben and Erin does work-

[ophelia]

2 minutes ago, SassyPants said:

He is eight years older than Ben and Erin does work-

Thank you for pointing that out. Being 8 years older and really having to take care of his family financially adds up perfectly to the reasons why he might appear or might even be more mature.

[Hisey]

5 hours ago, Snarkylark said:

This is kind of my point. What does a certificate of live birth have to do with parental rights? It's a document detailing the situation at birth. You don't change the place and city of birth on the document. Certainly there are other documents involved in the termination of parental rights and then the adoption. I don't see why birth certificates are changed. I still believe a child has a right to that information. 

Again, people don't change birth certificates to hide information from children. Very few people involved in adoption today think it's good to hide things from a child. On the contrary, the emphasis (correctly) is on openness and honesty. My own children were told they were adopted before they could even understand this term. No secrets here.

The best interest of the child is the correct thing to focus on. Also, as a parent, I focus on what would make my child most comfortable with himself or herself. Would she want a birth certificate that has two sets of parents? Does she want a birth certificate that has names of people she does not know (her birthparents)? Or may have hurt her (in the case of TPRs)? Or does she want a birth certificate with the names of the adults who see her every day, and hopefully take care of her? Perhaps she struggles to feel fully part of her adoptive family (this can happen, in particular, when there are also bio kids in the family), and her birthparents on her BC would just make her feel more of an "outsider."

I just took my daughter to the DMV for her drivers license. If my name had not been on that birth certificate, it would have been much harder to get things done (some stupid staffer already complicated it by getting riled up that my daughter was born in China). Even worse, it would have embarrassed her enormously. And made her sad.

Personally, I don't care whose name is on the BC. I care about getting my daughter through her childhood as happy and confident as possible, with few incidents that make her feel bad. With both my kids, adoption is an intensely private matter, often misunderstood as it seems to be by the OP. You think you know what my kid wants, but maybe you don't, really. 

People always seem to get bent out of shape about what they think an adopted child is "missing" (you're hiding information! that birth certiciate is not right!). How many take the time to actually ask an adoptive child what she wants? Have you?

[Bad Wolf]

My grandson, just today, was talking about his bio dad and wishing he could remember him better. He's deceased. Grandson was adopted by daughter's husband, and the bc reflects that. No secrecy, he knows his relatives on that side of the family, and has contact with them. Still, he wonders.

[OrchidBlossom]

On 6/4/2016 at 10:45 PM, Mercer said:

You can't necessarily tell someone's views of contraception based on how many children they have. Some couples have trouble conceiving, or have multiple miscarriages - you can't know how many pregnancies a couple has had just by counting the children in the family, or know how long they tried without successful conception.

Unless Cathy has stated she and her husband only wanted two children, the number of offspring doesn't really prove anything because there are so many other factors involved besides the parents' views on birth control.

We also can't assume that a family isn't fundie just because the mother worked outside the home at times. While there are some vocal purists who will never allow women to work outside the home under any circumstances, most of the highly conservative families I know are somewhat more pragmatic and will have the mom take a job rather than let the family starve, even if it doesn't fully suit their idea of gender roles.

Not all fundies forbid pants or eschew college.

I'm not necessarily saying Cathy was/is hyper-conservative... just that I don't think there's enough evidence to say for sure that she isn't.

You're right, I didn't mean to imply that I think Cathy is pro-contraception because of her family size. For me it is much more about small comments she has made throughout the show that imply to me that she is fundie (and of the same variety if not exactly IBLP as the Duggars) but also that it was a later development, which is why I think she may not ALWAYS have been anti-contraception but likely is now. Like I said the biggest flag of this to me was the "raised him with the same instruction manual" comment but there were others.

As far as this whole adoptive v natural parent debate and whether or not birth certificates can/should be changed, people keep throwing out the word "rights" but I'm not sure they are people particularly well versed in that stuff. Laws surrounding adoption (and child custody, and really anything with children) are based on the best interests of the child as judged in those particular circumstances. It's not about anyone's "rights" really its about protecting the minor children and doing what is best for them  in each particular instance.

[patsymae]

4 minutes ago, OrchidBlossom said:

You're right, I didn't mean to imply that I think Cathy is pro-contraception because of her family size. For me it is much more about small comments she has made throughout the show that imply to me that she is fundie (and of the same variety if not exactly IBLP as the Duggars) but also that it was a later development, which is why I think she may not ALWAYS have been anti-contraception but likely is now. Like I said the biggest flag of this to me was the "raised him with the same instruction manual" comment but there were others.

As far as this whole adoptive v natural parent debate and whether or not birth certificates can/should be changed, people keep throwing out the word "rights" but I'm not sure they are people particularly well versed in that stuff. Laws surrounding adoption (and child custody, and really anything with children) are based on the best interests of the child as judged in those particular circumstances. It's not about anyone's "rights" really its about protecting the minor children and doing what is best for them  in each particular instance.

Children don't need protection in the form of fake birth certificates, and having access to the truth about y6our heritage and birth is indeed a right for Americans, except those who were adopted. Fake birth accounts are for the sake of the adopters, not the children.

[OrchidBlossom]

Just now, patsymae said:

Children don't need protection in the form of fake birth certificates, and having access to the truth about y6our heritage and birth is indeed a right for Americans, except those who were adopted. Fake birth accounts are for the sake of the adopters, not the children.

Interesting, can you please quote me the statute or passage of the constitution under which that right is conferred to American citizens?

[patsymae]

6 minutes ago, OrchidBlossom said:

Interesting, can you please quote me the statute or passage of the constitution under which that right is conferred to American citizens?

Since birth certificates are the responsibilities of individual states, they wouldn't be the subject of ant clauses in the federal Constitution. Seeing as how you're so smart and all I'm surprises do you didn't know that. You can check each state yourself if you're that interested

[OrchidBlossom]

2 minutes ago, patsymae said:

Since birth certificates are the responsibilities of individual states, they wouldn't be the subject of ant clauses in the federal Constitution. Seeing as how you're so smart and all I'm surprises do you didn't know that. You can check each state yourself if you're that interested

Well, for a start, I didn't specify the federal constitution. I can see how you took it that way, for which I apologize, but I meant ANY constitution, which is why I also included statutes, I wanted any provision of any law in the US which so specifies. Further, I'm going to go ahead and guess that no state has a constitutional provision that says "everyone has a right to know their birth parent's identities except adoptees" because that kind of sounds like a major violation of equal protection. However, I did invite you to prove me wrong by quoting any such provision which does exist. If you know of a state which has such a provision of law I would be glad to know of it and discuss it. Otherwise it isn't in my plan for the day to read through every state's constitution to see if that is there. You are asserting that it is, I am asking you to prove it.

[foreign fundie]

5 hours ago, anotherone said:

To really help financially, microloans are much more effective.  The concept originally was to help poor women start up businesses by loaning them very small amounts in groups of four.  They all have to be responsible for the loan so peer pressure among the group of 4 pushes all of them to pay back the money.  Examples of successes are one woman bought a cow and sold milk in the mornings.  Another bought a pot and bowls and sold soup on the street corner.  Those kinds of things.  Making a bunch of bracelets and shipping them to another continent where there is such an excess of that kind of stuff is probably just for show.

 

10 hours ago, Palimpsest said:

You should look into any charitable organization, big or small, to see how much of the money you donate actually goes to the people you mean to help.  It is reasonable to spend about 15 - 25% on administration/fundraising costs/and overhead.  What people's personal cut-off point for organizations they want to support on that may vary.

Most of the missionaries I know, and certainly my family members, were/are not in it for the money.  They were also not fly-by-night IFB-types without a clue what they are doing - except fundraising so they can go to convert Christians to the right kind of Christianity.  

SOS and the Dillards certainly don't seem to know how they can help the local people build a sustainable business. The model you describe here is rubbish.  Disempowering rubbish too.  Enabling not empowering. 

Here's an example of a good organization and a good model.  It started out very small and is still small, in the greater scheme of things.  It may not be perfect, but it is a darn sight better than what you describe.  Also note that it has the annual report and review are right there on the website.  https://www.farmafrica.org/about/about-us  

Here is an article about another project for women: http://www.meda.org/youth-team-blog/entry/growing-entrepreneurs-growing-opportunities-for-generations-to-come

I realize that you are seeing this through rose colored glasses but wake up!  Give a man a fish ...

BTW, SOS Ministries never got back to me to answer my very polite request for clarification and more information about their water projects in Africa.  They didn't send me a copy of their annual report either.  They don't want informed donors, obviously.  That puts them straight onto my scammers list.  They are funding voluntourism and supporting their grifters not helping anyone. 

If all they want to do is church plant, fine.  I won't fund it.  But don't pretend to have a ministry helping women in business and use those photos for marketing.  That is false and deceptive and a scam.

 

Jesus wept.  So will I! 

To both of these, of course I agree. It is an inadequate model. I never said it wasn't. I also never said SOS was a reliable club or that I think the Dillards have a great empowering ministry. I have seen plenty of these projects up close and while they give sime relief, they are dependent on missionaries who come and go. I only argued that this jewel selling is probably not filling the Dillards' pockets. And I agree pictures can be misleading.

[anotherone]

2 hours ago, patsymae said:

Children don't need protection in the form of fake birth certificates, and having access to the truth about y6our heritage and birth is indeed a right for Americans, except those who were adopted. Fake birth accounts are for the sake of the adopters, not the children.

What exactly does that mean, the bolded part.  How is that my right?  I'm not adopted, but if my dad wouldn't talk about his estranged family and never brought us to meet his relatives, and I know absolutely no one from his side of the family and when he died it was still this way, there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.  I can't demand he tell us about our heritage, he didn't want to and that is that.  I would like to know this stuff of course, how the elders died and how many second cousins I might have had, etc.  but I will never know this and it makes no sense to say I have a right as an American to know this information. 

In a way he behaved no differently than a birth mom that didn't want to be found and he actually has every right to do that.