but one of my best friends is a single woman with two girls from China, and I have learned quite a bit from her. Every point I can make has been made before so I'll be brief:

Adoptive parents have to go through an adoption agency that is approved and there are many hurdles to jump through. You DON'T just waltz into the country and pick up a baby if the mood strikes you.

Girls are adopted because they are available. A few boys are given up if they have a disability (and I understand they do get adopted out).

As for those who think we should adopt locally first: A baby is a baby. Are Chinese babies less deserving than American babies? Furthermore, the Chinese babies usually spend significant portions of the childhood in orphanages, which vary in quality and are usually crowded. When my friend got her oldest daughter seven years ago, she was 11 months old and from the pix, she looked about 4 months old and was clearly developmentally behind (she's fine now). I don't think American babies have it quite so bad.

According to my friend, there are not so many babies up for adoption right now because the economy is doing OK. When there is a downturn in the Chinese economy, the babies will be given up at higher rates again. We'll see about those new rules then.

China has every right to place restrictions on potential adoptive parents, but we can be forgiven for expecting those restrictions to be of a nature that will benefit the children, not make China feel better about itself. My friend is a great mother who decided to make the lives of two children better...perhaps immeasurably better...than to artifically inseminate or to marry someone she didn't love so she could have a baby the traditional way. Talking about someone like her as though she was a spoiled yuppie bothers me.

Dobson claims that Mary Cheney's pregnancy is a mistake because the traditional married man/woman arrangement is optimal for children. Even if it were true, what the hell does that mean for Mary Cheney? Was she supposed to magically turn straight and marry a man? Is the baby's future so horrible that he/she would be better off not being born at all? Should Mary Cheney give the baby up to a heterosexual couple?

Maybe people with high-school educations shouldn't have babies because children have so many benefits from being born to college-educated parents. Maybe klutzy people (me) shouldn't have children because children benefit from athletic, graceful parents (OK, I made that up, sorta like Dobson). Makes as much sense to me. If you aren't able to do it perfectly according to Dobson, don't do it at all.

I think Dobson would find fault with my housekeeping, so I'm going to stop all cleaning and cooking.

think again. I deeply regret looking up the term "dirty sanchez".

Jeez, I've heard so much about what the Tech administration should or did or didn't do...you'd think they, not the gunman, killed 33 people. Newsflash: putting a campus on lockdown typically requires sending the students to their dorms. Sending students back to dorms would have seemed more dangerous than keeping them in classrooms...after all, a dorm is where the first shooting took place. The first shooting was also at a time when people were arriving on campus and were moving between places. Contacting, let alone controlling, that number of people is no small task. Finally, most people would have figured that if a gunman was going on a shooting spree he'd have done it the first time.

Let's keep the focus on understanding how and why the shooter acted and keep the second guessing to a minimum, at least until more info comes in.

The more I read about this guy, the more I think he suffered from a very serious mental disorder, probably paranoid schizophrenia. I guess time will tell. However, be careful with the assumption that if only caught in time, the guy could have stopped. In the absence of clear threat or serious disruption...and disturbed writing alone doesn't count...the Americans with Disabilities Act does not allow colleges to evict students for mental illness. I'm not sure that legally Tech could have done anything to dislodge the guy or force him into treatment. Most people suffering from mental illness are not a danger to anyone but themselves, so let's not rush into judgement.

I said that most mentally ill people are not dangerous to anyone but themselves (which is found in multiple abnormal psychology information sources as well as the DSM, hardly a woman's magazine). I don't think I said psychotic people never hurt anyone (but even so, schizophrenia is present in about 1 out of 100 people, which is a lot of people; I too can think of schizophrenics who have been dangerous and violent but statistically they aren't the norm). In his guy's case he was apparently showing multiple danger signs and at least one professor notified the campus policy, student affairs, etc to no avail. It may not have been apparent that the fire he had reportedly set earlier was intentional. Otherwise he didn't meet the criteria the school needed to legally remove him, let alone commit him.

My words about mentally people are intended to dissuade others from becoming paranoid and over-reacting to mentally ill people, most of whom are grappling with a disease the best way they can. It would be a shame if mental illness regained its former degree of stigma.

I don't think there will ever be a time when most people feel that the perfect balance has been reached between the students' and the schools' rights when the student has been demonstrating irrational or seriously dysfunctional behavior, particularly when the student resists outreach.