but they’re blonde

A few days ago, I mentioned here that reporters were beginning to sniff around the adorable little children of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts and his wife… You see, the children are blonde, and that didn’t quite jive with the official story, which held that they’d been adopted from Latin America. (Apparently this was something that not even the American press, in it’s shell-shocked, demoralized and dilapidated state could let slip by.) Well, it seems as though the mystery has now been solved.

According to a new article in Time, both children are, in fact, Irish by birth. Here’s a clip:

Jack McCay, law partner of Roberts’ wife Jane and a friend, speaks of the couple’s adoption of John (Jack) and Josephine, born in Ireland 4 1/2 months apart. “As frequently happens when you go through the adoption process, some of the efforts weren’t successful, and it continued for a time … But when the opportunity came along to have not just one but two kids, they took both babies without blinking.”

So, it would appear that although born in Ireland, the kids were adopted in Latin America because Irish law doesn’t allow foreign adoption. I know that sounds bad, like they must have twisted and broken laws in order to get their hands on these kids, but apparently, at least according to what I’m readying, it’s an accepted practice. Here, to explain it, is a comment that was left on the Is That Legal site:

There is nothing illegal or underhanded about this. Irish law makes it extremely difficult, if not to say impossible, for non-Irish citizens to adopt Irish children. These were “private adoptions” — the children being adopted directly to a couple, rather than through an orphanage (which is very common in the U.S. these days). What likely happened is that the mothers and children traveled to a Latin country where such adoptions were legal and easy, and to which they could travel without a visa or where getting one would not pose a problem. The children could not have come to the U.S. for the private adoption, because under U.S. law they would have been seen as “intending immigrants” and thus have been refused visas/entry. Once the children were adopted, the Roberts would have gone to the local U.S. embassy to obtain the proper immigrant visa for the children. (U.S. consular officers, as part of the process, are required to investigate the circumstances of all foreign adoptions, to assure that everything is on the up and up.) The process was obivously bit convoluted, because the children were Irish. If the Roberts’ had decided to adopt in Lithuania or Norway or China, where foreign adoptions are legal, the process would have been simpler — the whole business, including getting the immigrant visas would have taken place in the local country. But fundamentally the adoption process would be no different.

So, it would seem to me that there’s probably no story here. Sure, given the fact that they’re well off financially and politically well-connected, they were able to sidestep the process that many American couples have to slog through, but it doesn’t seem, at least to me, as though it indicates anything one way or another about the man, his ethics, or anything else. For those things, I think we need to dig deeper into his writings over the past few decades and the work he’s done on behalf of the past few Republican administrations.

By now, I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the idea that Roberts would get the appointment, anyway. I know it would probably be a bad thing for privacy rights and all, but the thought that keeps me sane is that there’s a chance that he’ll jump the extremist ship once he accepts his lifetime appointment to the bench. I know it might sound crazy, but I keep thinking that there’s a chance that he’s secretly gay and that he’s been working his whole life just to get to the point where he could undergo a very visible metamorphosis in front of the American people, becoming our first flamingly gay Supreme Court justice… Yes, I predict that within two years of taking his seat, he’ll be redesigning the robes and presiding over the court like Paul Lynde in the center square. (Thanks to Jim for the links.)