ADOPTION.COM BOYCOTT URGED!!!!!!!

Dear Adoption Professional:

As an adoption professional listed at the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys website, I am writing to make you aware that a growing community of adoptive parents will be boycotting all organizations and companies that are advertise at, list themselves at, or are affiliated with the Adoption.com website, owned by Nathan Gwilliam.

As part of our advocacy, we will also be publicizing the discriminatory policies of Adoption.com with the media and online. We will also be publicizing the names of those individuals and organizations who financially support Adoption.com by providing advertising revenue or paid listings, including via Google advertisements and banner advertising at the entire Adoption.com network of websites.

The reason? You may not be aware, but with no notice, Adoption.com this week closed down the "Nontraditional Families" Forum. (Nontraditional Families was their "preferred" term for gay/lesbian parents). All the content posted by families at that forum was also deleted without notice. Discussions of the elimination of this forum have been deleted, and moderators are deleting all discussions that relate to this issue in a total censoring of the issue.

At the same time, it has also come to light that Adoption.com has made public the fact that they PROHIBIT PAID ADVERTISING in their prospective adoptive family "Profiles" pages from SINGLE people, or GAY/LESBIAN couples.

Adoption.com's moves may in part be retribution over a recent lawsuit by a same-sex couple against Adoption.com, which refused the couple the opportunity purchase a paid family profile listing.  Adoption.com told the couple that "Adoption.com does not allow gay and lesbian couples to use their services."  While Adoption.com recently petitioned the court to dismiss the case, the judge has just ruled that the case was not going to be thrown out, and will proceed. ( http://www.nclrights.org/cases/adoptiondotcom.htm )

As a stopgap measure, a new forum has been put up by Adoption.com yesterday, but the extremely restrictive instructions are that members can only discuss "post-adoption support of children" -- making it against the Adoption.com rules to acknowledge or aid in any way adoption by gay families or to discuss anything that, as they state, "involves activism."

A new, non-discriminatory forum away from Adoption.com has been started and hundreds of long-time members -- straight and gay, single and married -- are leaving the Adoption.com forums for good, due to the discriminatory environment and heavy-handed and oppressive censorship there.

We thought you should be aware that a growing list of people with a conscience in the adoption community will be actively and vigorously publicizing the discriminatory activities of Adoption.com , and by association, those individuals and organizations who provide revenue to the company.

We urge you to contact Nathan Gwilliam and encourage him to change his company's overtly discriminatory policy.

We urge you to stop any advertising or paid listings at the Adoption.com network of sites until such time as the site fully permits singles and gay/lesbian families full and equal access to all of their services.

We urge you to spread the word to other professionals, so that such discriminatory activities can be eliminated.

Please remember that in business, we are the company we keep.  Please don't expect those of us who are appalled by Adoption.com's discrimination to value the choices of those individuals and organizations who choose to remain as sponsors/advertisers or pay for listings at the Adoption.com site.

Sincerely,

Paula Desena, Adoptive Parent
Straight but Not Narrow Adoptive Parents Coalition