Well, it’s a legal situation. The father hasn’t relinquished his rights. He gets to make a determination of where she lives. He’s chosen the family that already has the sister. I mean, that’s the reason. He’s also regularly visited his daughter and so have the relatives she’s going to live with.

Don’t feel bad, Jezebel and Gawker do that shit all the time.

“...especially if you are poverty stricken.” Put that in bold. Poor people are swallowed up by the system and it never ends.

Apparently - and the reason she’s been with them for so long is because they’ve been delaying the process of returning her to her family for 4 years. Her father and extended family have geographically and financially gone out of their way to visit her once a month for years, and she has regularly skyped with all of…

And at least in my state, if your goal is “foster-to-adopt,” you are only ever placed with children who are legally free to be adopted, not kids with a parent who hasn’t signed away their rights. Jesus.

I’m new, so this will probably stay in the grey, but I just wanted to say that the way most media is portraying this is despicable.

I don’t even agree with this headline. It could have just as easily read something like “Child returned to family after long battle with foster family.”

I have a lot of social workers as…

She is eligible for citizenship in the Choctaw Nation, and her father is a Choctaw citizen. That’s it. Full stop. That makes her and her father Choctaw. Don’t throw white-imposed blood quantum levels into it.

Exactly my thoughts. If they truly cared for her welfare they would have put on a brave face and smiled and told her that she’s going to live in a super cool place with fun people and that they will try to visit her as often as possible. Instead they chose to completely traumatize her with a media circus and…

Her father always had parental rights; she was never their child. She was never adoptable.

No, they haven’t. She’s been with them four years, and they were told at the outset (and repeatedly thereafter) that she was not adoptable and that family reunification was the goal of her case. As responsible fosters they should have put her interests before their own by trying to facilitate that reunification in a…

Her father is a member of the Choctaw tribe, so it really doesn’t matter how many parts she is.

Or maybe it was cruel of the foster parents to keep her for all these years fighting a custody battle they could never win because under the law they have never had any legal leg to stand on.

It really sucks that the custody exchange was such a circus, and Lexi was exposed to the foster family crying and screaming, and random strangers showing up needlessly to add to the din. A 6-year-old can’t possibly process all that in a healthy way — it must have seemed intensely frightening and confusing. I’m…

A prisoner is a person. A clump of cells is not a person. You’re taking the ‘chance of life’ away every time a man masturbates, wears a condom, a woman takes the pill, decides not to have sex with someone. Do you suggest getting rid of all of those choices? To equate ‘the chance of life’ and ‘a life’ is ridiculous.…

Like over half of us IN THIS THREAD. :)

Well, the episode is called Dopplegangland.

I went to a party for the last Republican debate that Trump was in. There were maybe six folks in a room at one point, half women, and one guy asked “if you HAD to vote for a Republican, which would you pick.” All three of us women said “Trump” without pausing. We all loathe him, but he’s the only candidate who has…

This is so infuriating. I feel so sorry for anyone in his jurisdiction that is a victim of rape. Here is the proof you need that you won’t be taken seriously.

Honestly, there are many people in the GOP to blame for the current state of affairs, including many people who worked for and were empowered by the Bush administration, but to be fair, both W. and Laura made active attempts to push back against the virulent xenophobia that Karl Rove played with to get him elected.…