[dj_venom]

Originally Posted by Darzog

Back to the topic at hand. It's not like this guy was selling his daughter into slavery. He was selling her to a family that wanted a child of their own. I think the reason I'm not as upset by this as you are is that I don't see this as treating a child as a commodity. I see the money as a convenience fee. Think about it this way... if you go into a grocery store and buy popcorn that you have to take home and cook yourself, you will pay much less than if you buy popcorn at the movies. Why? Because they have cooked it for you and have it ready for you at the place you want to eat it at (the movies). You are paying more for the convenience of getting what you want in an easy and timely manner. You are not paying for the popcorn itself, you are paying for the way that it is given to you.

Not really, if you buy the already cooked stuff in a shop, it's much cheaper, they charge extra because of the monopoly in existence.

Originally Posted by Darzog

I see this situation in a similar way. The family wasn't paying because they wanted to own a child. They were paying so they could skip the red tape associated with a formal adoption process and the lengthy delays in getting a child. They were interested enough in having a child they were willing to pay (sacrifice money) in order to speed up the process. The father was getting payment for offering that convenience. The process itself is what is dictating the payment, not ownership of the child. The child would not be property to the new parents, she would have been a member of the family.

I'm sorry, but I must disagree with you there:

Originally Posted by Article

Schneider said the couple wanted to contact attorneys and follow legal adoption procedures, but the man did not want to involve attorneys.

Secondly, we can't know what was in the contract to be signed. As you and Lestat have said, we do have to wait for more information, but obviously a contract would have been signed, it just depended what was in that...

Originally Posted by Darzog

I see this as very different from selling a child as property or as a slave. Because of that difference in opinion I am not as emotional or appalled by the situation as you seem to be.

So would you, or would you not, say the child is worth $10,000? Because to me, it reads as though that is how much the child was worth to him, something that will be branded to the child for the rest of their life.

Originally Posted by Darzog

And the point that Lestat and I both keep coming back to is that we don't know what the motivation of the situation was. We don't know everything that was going on, and until we can know for sure what really happened, we're not ready to just cast the guy to the wolves.

Well I'm not ready to help him do home repairs .