Former Washington state Rep. Matt Shea, the far-right Republican who was found by a House-commissioned investigation to have planned and participated in domestic terrorism, is in a small town in Poland with more than 60 Ukrainian children, trying to facilitate their adoption in America.
Shea has said his group helped rescue 62 children and their two adult caregivers from an orphanage in Mariupol, the city in southeastern Ukraine that has been bombarded by Russian forces.
But international agencies say, with the chaos and confusion of war, now is not an appropriate time for international adoptions from Ukraine. And Shea’s presence, and the lack of information surrounding the American group he’s with, has raised concerns among some residents of Kazimierz Dolny, the small Polish town where the children are staying at a hotel-guesthouse.
“I asked him many times, ‘What are you going to do with these children?’ and he told me that it’s not my business,’” Weronika Ziarnicka, an aide to the mayor of Kazimierz Dolny, said of Shea. “I got the feeling in my gut that something’s wrong with this guy; he didn’t want to tell me his last name.”
Shea, who rarely speaks to mainstream media, did not respond to requests for comment.
Speaking on a Polish television show, “Idź Pod Prąd,” Shea said he was working with a Texas group called Loving Families and Homes for Orphans (he also called the group Loving Homes and Families for Orphans).
“It is a hosting organization that hosts Ukrainian orphans in America with Ukrainian families with the intent that ultimately that ends in adoption,” Shea said on the show. “It’s been doing this hosting program for several years.”
Loving Families and Homes for Orphans appears to have a website, but it is nonfunctional.
The group, based in Fort Worth, registered with the Texas secretary of state in 2018. No such group is registered as an adoption agency with the Texas Department of Health and Human Services. The group is also not registered with the Intercountry Adoption Accreditation and Maintenance Entity, the group that oversees American agencies involved in international adoption.
A nonprofit group called Loving Families and Homes for Orphans was registered in Florida just one month ago. It lists its purpose as: “To provide loving and caring homes and families for the orphans from other countries for a short time period.”
The group was registered by Irina N. Sipko of Palm Coast, Florida. Sipko did not return requests for comment.
Artur Pomianowski, the mayor of Kazimierz Dolny, said in a post on Facebook that he’d visited the children and they are safe and being well cared-for. He also said the “case is being investigated and clarified by the relevant authorities” and that the kids would not leave Kazimierz Dolny without consent of the authorities.
“I do not know what Matt Shea and his friends are doing here around children,” Pomianowski said in an email. “Mr. Shea and his friends have given us some contradictory information and, for that reason, it is difficult for us to trust them.”
In a statement posted to Facebook by Dom Dziennikarza, the journalists’ guesthouse where the children are staying, Loving Families and Homes for Orphans says it is a Christian organization based in Texas and that Sipko is the director.
“We are in direct contact with the governments of Ukraine and the United States, supported by the highest levels of politicians, international and local church leaders as well as dozens of companies from Ukraine, the USA and Poland,” the statement says.
The U.S. State Department did not directly respond when asked if they’d been in contact with Loving Families, but a spokesperson warned: “Only accredited Adoption Service Providers are authorized to facilitate intercountry adoptions of children to the United States.”
It can be extremely difficult in wartime to determine whether children who appear to be orphans truly are eligible for adoption, the State Department said.
“It is not uncommon in dangerous situations for parents to send their children out of the area, for safety reasons, or for families to become separated during an emergency,” the State Department spokesperson said. “Even when a child’s parents have died, children are often cared for by other relatives. Also, many children living in orphanages in Ukraine are not orphans.”
The National Council for Adoption said this is not the time for U.S. citizens to be considering adoption from Ukraine, as many families fleeing the war become separated.
“It is paramount that the identities of these children and their families be clearly established, and their social, legal, and familial status is fully verified by governmental authorities,” the council said. “For most of these children, we cannot do that at this time.”
The United Nations High Commission on Refugees and UNICEF put out a joint statement calling for temporary and foster care for children but saying “Adoption should not occur during or immediately after emergencies.”
The number of people that get sexual reassignment surgery is extremely small as a percentage of the population. The number that participate in sports is even smaller. It’s certainly nt a problem that needs to be addressed in Congress or in the state legislatures. Let the governing bodies of the various sports address it.
Nebulous
A) If you’re not good enough to be competitive on the men’s team, you’re sure not going to be making records on the women’s team. There’s not THAT much difference in most sports.
B) Would anybody actually believe that a jock would want to become a woman and draw the ire of conservative homophobes and transphobes merely because he’s not the top man on the team?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
OldCoal
So show me this line of young men eager for surgery or chemical castration so they can compete in women’s sports!
And you can’t. You can’t because it doesn’t exist. A tiny handful of people on hormones or who’ve had surgery want to compete and that’s a national issue because Tucker and his buddies say it is. Why?
Their usual whine is “gender assigned at birth”. Yet the briefest possible glance at Caspar Semenya’s Wikipedia page clearly says HER gender assigned at birth was female, and she’s never taken hormone therapy of any kind. But SHE has issues being allowed to compete.
I’m sure she’s grateful to all you Qubs. /s
And, just to get the rest of the story:
THIS is what Qublicans usually cite about cisgender sport:
ally includes suppressing testosterone levels and boosting estrogen.
The research was carried out by Dr. Timothy Roberts, a pediatrician and associate professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and his colleagues. They found that trans women who underwent hormone therapy for one year continued to outperform non-transgender women, also known as cisgender women, though the gap largely closed after two years. But even then, trans women still ran 12% faster.
HOWEVER they leave off this part (usual Qub partial quotes) :
Roberts, however, suggested the difference in running times needs additional perspective. “It was a 12% advantage after two years in run times. But to be in the top 10% of female runners, you have to be 29% faster than the average woman. And to be an elite runner, you’ve got to be 59% faster than the average cis woman,” he told DW.