Raymond Godwin and Nightlight Christian Adoption recipient of Demons of Adoption Award
Since 1995, the month of November has been designated as Adoption Awareness Month. We at Pound Pup Legacy try to contribute to this commemoration, by raising awareness for abuse in adoptive homes, disrupted adoptions, violated parental rights, child trafficking for adoption, and other horrors in adoption.
The start of Adoption Awareness Month also means the announcement of the recipient of the Demons of Adoption Award. Started in 2007, as a critique on the Congressional Angels in Adoption Awards
TM, the Demons of Adoption Awards have become an annual tradition, continued now for seven years in a row.
In September we asked our readers to nominate candidates, and many worthy contenders were added. In October we launched a ballot to collect the votes for each nominee. From the start, it was a very close race between two nominees: Raymond Godwin et al., and Children in Families First (CHIFF) - with the remaining entries trailing far behind.
There is great irony to the candidacy of adoption attorney Raymond W Godwin and his wife, director of Nightlight Christian Adoption in South Carolina, Laura Beauvais-Godwin. In 2010, the current President of The Heritage Foundation and at the time Senator of South Carolina, Jim DeMint, awarded the Godwins for a Congressional Angel in Adoption
TM.
The Angels in Adoption have never been awarded with much scrutiny into candidates. Silly, but otherwise benign, was the award by then Senator of Kansas Sam Brownback for his "precious wife" Mary Brownback, with whom he had adopted a child from Guatemala and one from China.
Much more seriously, Jerry Sandusky received an award out of the hands of Rick Santorum, a decision that needed to be reverted back in 2011, when it became clear Sandusky had molested several boys, including his own adopted son.
Senator Chuck Grassley, awarded Damien and Allonna Stovall with an Angel in Adoption
TM, in 2012. Six months later, the couple was charged with beating their adopted children with belts and wooden spoons, although those charges were later dropped.
In 2007, Representative Patrick Murphy determined an award should be given to Steven G. Dubin, whom at the time was under investigation for fraudulent adoption practices, and whose membership of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys was suspended, only three months after being lauded as an Angel in Adoption. Dubin was eventually disbarred in the State of Pennsylvania, October 31, 2012.
In 2005, convicted criminal, Representative William Jefferson, nominated one of his cronies Renee Gill Pratt, and a year later, Senator Johnny Isakson awarded Faith Allen, the former "savior" of Masha Allen, who abandoned her adopted daughter in Washington DC, the day after the Angel in Adoption gala.
That same year, Senator Orrin Hatch nominated Larry S Jenkins, a Utah attorney, who is involved in nearly every father's rights violation case over the last 10 years.
When it comes to using laws to lure women into relinquishing children out of state, without notifying fathers, Larry S. Jenkins has found his match. Raymond Godwin has figured out that the adoption statutes of South Carolina make such unsavory inter-state adoptions about as easy as they are in Utah.
Raymond Godwin and his wife Laura have been involved in two of the most contentious adoptions of 2013, known as the baby Veronica case and the baby Deseray case. Both cases revolve around interstate adoptions of Native American children from Oklahoma to South Carolina.
The baby Veronica case has been all over the news, especially since the case went all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States, where a verdict was rendered in favor of the adoptive couple Matt and Melanie Capobianco.
Late September, the Capobiacos, at the time assisted by another of Jim DeMint's Angels in Adoption, attorney James Fletcher Thompson, were able to remove Veronica from the home of her father Dusten Brown, with whom she had lived the last two years.
The case of baby Deseray is just as interesting, although it lacks the sensationalism of going all the way up to the Supreme Court. In this case, Godwin originally cooperated with Angel in Adoption Mike Yeksavich, an attorney from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Bado & Bado - a couple of adoption attorneys from Edmond, Oklahoma, who were publicly reprimanded for unethical practices by the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys - to place the child with Bobby and Diane Bixler, a couple in their 60s, of Irmo, South Carolina.
Baby Deseray was removed from Oklahoma without properly filing the Interstate Custody for the Placement of Children (ICPC) paperwork. As a result, Mike Yeksavich removed himself from the case, and subsequently attempted to halt the adoption of the baby to the Bixlers and demanded her return.
Four months after the removal of Baby Deseray, the Oklahoma administrator for the Interstate Custody for the Placement of Children (ICPC) applications, and Angel in Adoption, Michael A. Nomura, approved the paperwork for the child's adoptive parents, after the Bixlers had retained attorney Paul E. Swain, who sits on the board of Nomura's agency Heritage Family Services, Inc.
The Baby Deseray case is still in motion. At this time of writing, the girl is in temporary foster care, pending emergency litigation.
No matter how we look at these cases, what we see are multiple placements of the same children, all because an adoption attorney endeavors in, to put it mildly, legally adventurous practices.
Raymond Godwin, may have stayed strictly within the law, with the Baby Veronica case. While there may be difference of opinion on that particular issue, it is indisputable that the trajectory he chose for these two adoptions was legally complex, making it very possible that the adoptions would be contested.
Knowingly starting an adoption procedure that can reasonably be expected to be contested, is immoral. Adoption, when practiced, should increase a child's stability in life, not lower it. Raymond Godwin and his wife Laura knowingly created a situation that was potentially disruptive, and ended up actually being disruptive for two children. For that, they deserve to be recognized as Demons of Adoption.
We would like to thank all our readers for their nominations and for their votes, and it is our hope that the Demons of Adoption Award brings to light the more serious adoption issues that still need to be addressed throughout the year, not just during November, America's National Adoption Month.