FlynetPictures.comIs it easier for celebrities to get approved for adoption?
—Queen of Shoes, via Twitter
If you're assuming the answer is yes, you're not alone. (In fact, you just may be cynical enough to be a tiny me. Hi, tiny me!)
Human-rights groups in Malawi—Madonna's adoption country of choice—are also saying that Madonna is getting fast-tracked in her efforts to adopt a 4-year-old girl to keep little David Banda company.
Madge is denying any star treatment, of course. And Angelina Jolie, who has adopted three foreign-born moppets, also has said she got no special handling in those cases. But some facts seem to contradict that...
• Child advocacy groups have lined up against Madonna's proposed adoption of a girl named Mercy. "We feel Madonna is behaving like a bully," Undule Mwakusungula, chairman of the Human Rights Consultative Committee, told the Associated Press. "She has the money and the status to use her profile to manipulate, to fast-track the process."
• Malawian law on foreign adoptions is vague and largely untested. Regulations state only that would-be parents undergo an 18- to 24-month assessment period—but that rule was essentially thrown out the window when Madonna was allowed to almost immediately spirit her first Malawian child, David, to London.
• Yes, that's unusual. "It's not the way it's ordinarily done," says Dr. Howard Altstein, an international adoption expert at the University of Maryland. "An ordinary person would not have that kind of experience. It would take them much longer."
• Regarding La Jolie: Vietnam requires potential adopters to be either a married couple or a single parent—no shacker-uppers, like Brangelina. But when Jolie—arguably one half of the most famous unmarried couple on the planet—applied to adopt son Pax as a single mother, no one blinked.
• Again, that is just not normal. Says Altstein: "I don't think, if a noncelebrity would say 'I'm single' and actually be living with someone—I don't think they would get a child in Vietnam."
It's still too soon to say whether Madonna will enjoy any star status as she moves to take 4-year-old Mercy home with her. But stay tuned to E! Online for all the up-to-the-minute scoop.
Follow me on Twitter