Anyone who knows me knows I have little patience for the current occupant of the White House as well as all that he and his fellow Republicans currently represent. I know this period will go down as a dark stain in history. However, even with my lack of respect for any and all things MAGA, there are some lines that should not be crossed.

The meme above was posted yesterday in one of the groups I follow and got a lot of upvotes as well as love and laugh reactions. If you’re not adopted, you might not understand why it’s such an affront, even though it targets our idiot of a Vice President.

One of the common issues adoptees have is a struggle to feel wanted and capable of being loved. I have struggled with that most of my life, only I didn’t realize it until I took a deep dive into adoption social media. When I did, it was like a lightbulb went on. For the first time, I could pin down why I felt certain things and then go to work on it. I still struggle with being able to see myself as lovable. Love has always seemed transactional to me, as if no one will want to be around me unless I am doing something for them. Several people I’ve known in my life have reinforced that feeling.

This is why that meme is so offensive. By posting it, you might see it as just taking a swipe at Vance. I see it as a swipe at adoptees in general. The message society sends is that we are somehow “less than” in many ways. Our parents didn’t want us. We were thrown away. Oh, sure, when we’re young, we get this message that somehow we are special because we are “chosen.” That image fades as we get older and learn where babies really come from and more. I had a vision of my parents walking down a row of babies in cribs and saying, “I want that one!” The reality is much different. Learning that the people who made us didn’t want us is a hard thing to deal with, and when we try to work things through, we are usually shut down by people who think any time we spend trying to figure out who we are is an affront to the people who adopted us. Everyone else’s feelings are taken into consideration, except for the child that it affected.

To take a swipe at J.D. Vance by saying that his mother didn’t want him and traded him for drugs impacts everyone you may know who is adopted. You’re reinforcing the idea that we are somehow “less than” in society, that our birthparents didn’t want us because we are lacking somehow.

There’s another meme going around about how if you are MAGA and you agree with many of the racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and xenophobic comments out there, you are showing others what you think. You might repost a misogynistic meme, thinking it’s funny, but your daughter, wife, sister, etc., is going to see this and wonder if that’s how you see them. What message does that send to a child who might be gay? Or a woman who’s trying to get out of an abusive situation? Or the daughter who has glorious ambitions to break some of the glass ceilings out there?

The same is true for the meme above. You can’t share it and then say you didn’t mean it or it’s just a joke when people who are adopted inform you it upsets them. They might not call you on it, but they’ll remember it.

I’m not defending MAGA. I don’t like it at all. I don’t like or respect our President, Vice President, and everyone else that’s a part of it. If they all disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn’t miss them. I think people who are currently cheering it on are deplorable. However, some things reflect more on the people who share it than the people they are taking a shot at, and this is one of them. It doesn’t attack his policies, beliefs, tweets, or anything. It attacks who he is as an adoptee, and it attacks all of us who are adopted.