Mr. and Mrs. Chadwell ponder the hard choice of giving their gay daughter up for adoption.
A Southern Carolina couple have made national news by being the first parents to put their child up for adoption due to their sexuality. Usually parents give up their children because they can’t raise them due to finances or because they are young and don’t have the mental ability to bring up a child. Kids are also usually given up for adoption at a young age, but April Chadwell is barely 16 years old and has been listed as legally adoptable by the state of Southern Carolina. Mrs. Chadwell released a statement saying “It was a tough choice to give up our daughter to the state, but we don’t know how to handle someone who decides to live a lifestyle that we do not agree with”. The Chadwells said they had help from their local church, who prayed for weeks seeking guidance for the couple and came to the conclusion that it would be best to let the child go in hopes of being adopted by a gay friendly family.
So, what's the scoop?
In reality, the piece was written by a Daily Bleach columnist who calls himself Tyson Bowers III. For those of you who don't know, the Bleach is a website that's sort of like the poor man's Onion- in other words, it's cooked up by a clever comic. "Tyson Bowers" is their anti-sex superconservative character. His pieces take stabs at the racist, sexist, and homophobic views of those on the Christian right. To put it succinctly, the articles and the Chadwell family are 100% fiction.
It takes a pretty talented person to cook up a scandal as cleverly faked as this one, but the internet is full of such silliness. From the canard about baggy pants being a sign of prison homosexuality (it actually is because a cost-cutting state reduced the number of sizes available to inmates) to this whopper, folks are quick to believe whatever is posted on a Facebook wall. Authors who have even posted "this is a work of fiction" have had their satire interpreted as fact.
With Bowers' piece, the reason why it went viral is believability. It is absolutely possible that some wingnut parents would attempt to give their teen to the state due to their sexual orientation; after all, kids are frequently surrendered to Children's Aid or institutions because of disabilities or behavioural problems. Despite being a swipe at terrible religious parenting, concerned friends asked me to blog about these horrible stains on childrearing.
So why do people fall for such silliness? Quite simply, we love to be outraged and we're willing victims of our own emotions. We're also gullible as hell. Our willingness to suspend disbelief is why Leo Fitzpatrick was repeatedly attacked in real life because of a terrible character he portrayed in the film Kids. Almost everyone retweets links or shares Facebook wall posts in our day and age. We blindly follow the mob, so much so that it's almost unconscious. I've even caught myself doing it until I take the time to gather facts before authoring a post such as this one.
So, were the folks who alerted me to this manufactured scandal doing so to be malicious or waste my time? Heck, no- they did it because they care about people they've never met, real or imaginary. And that's perfectly fine. But people need to take 30 seconds and wander over to Google, Bing, or whatever search engine they use and find out for themselves what is real and what is not. Also, if a website is called The Daily Bleach, you can be pretty sure you're dealing with someone's interpretation of humour. Look into the supposed author of the piece, and if he seems more extreme than Stephen Colbert, he's probably a cleverly-designed yet still very fictional character.
Use your minds before having a coronary about something that would make Vonnegut chuckle.
Be well.
'From the canard about baggy pants being a sign of prison homosexuality (it actually is because a cost-cutting state reduced the number of sizes available to inmates)'
ReplyDeleteIn many places its simply because belts are a suicide risk and were removed, so trousers fell down :)
I'm talking about why rappers started wearing their pants down low. It was a sign they'd been in a California prison. :)
ReplyDeleteSouthern Carolina? Pretty sure that's not a state. . . .
ReplyDeleteWell, I'm pretty certain the author played with the way we process written words in a text. Now how ironic is it that I sometimes proofread other people's texts (not in English, admittedly), and what set me on the alert wasn't "Southern Carolina," but "a gay friendly family"? Not the words I would expect somebody like that "Tyson Bowers III" guy or the people in such a story to use.
DeleteJust for the record, its Leo Fitzpatrick not Leo Fitzgerald.
ReplyDeleteGah! And I've seen everything the guy's been in. That's what I get for multitasking at night. I also just noticed a tragic grammatical error. Fortunately, there's the little 'edit' button.
ReplyDeleteYou Do realize that it wasn't that long ago that you could be placed in an institution if you were found to be gay or even criminally charged and you could also leave your child to the state if there was evidence that your child was gay. It may not be something from our generation but go back to the 60's and earlier and do some research. I read an article on brief cases that had been stored from a long standing mental hospital which had been recently closed and some of the things that were in them were insightful(some of it not in a good way either) of our past. Yes this article disgusts us now(or should) but it was a common, even accepted, practice only a few generations ago so I can see were people would jump to believe it.
ReplyDeleteI clearly stated that the reason why we fall for such things IS the fact that they are indeed believable. It is entirely possible that religious parents would do such a thing, after all, they send their kids to ex-gay "therapists" and conversion camps. There is an entire industry based on the idea of turning gay and non-gender-conforming kids into what the parents or grandparents deem "normal".
DeleteIt should be noted that you can STILL be involuntarily hospitalized for being transsexual in many places, in fact, the author of this article spent 6 weeks in a secure psychiatric facility in the mid-90's for having "gender identity disorder".