Mike Gerson, former chief speechwriter to President Bush, has a tremendous column on international adoption in today’s Washington Post.  Mike has a reputation even among critics as not just a master communicator, but also both an incisive analyst of international issues and a devout Christian.  During work-related travel in Zambia, we visited homes of AIDS victims together, and I saw in him a truly Christlike heart of compassion—one not content with just writing about needs, but yearning to address them as well.

The full article is definitely worth the read for anyone who has pondered the ethnicity issues tied up in cross-racial adoption.  Here’s a few highlights:

The relationship [of adoption] results from a broken bond but creates ties as strong as genetics, stronger than race or tribe …

After millennia of racial and ethnic conflict across the world, resulting in rivers of blood, America declared that bloodlines don’t matter, that dignity is found beneath every human disguise. There is no greater embrace of this principle than an American family that looks like the world.

Instead of undermining any culture, international adoption instructs our own. Unlike the thin, quarrelsome multiculturalism of the campus, multiethnic families demonstrate the power of affection over difference. They tend to produce people who may look different from the norm of their community but see themselves as just normal, just human.

Read the whole article here.