A Member of the Stigmatized Disabled Writes to His Family

Another six months of Monica, have mercy; I don't care if it harelips the Governor. - Molly Ivins, Time.com

Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity - Erving Goffman

There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities. - Assistant City Prosecutor Jennifer Fitsimmons

Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, ... re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul - Walt Whitman, Preface to first edition of Leaves of Grass

To be decent, every person has to make their own ethical decisions. . . . If you are conformist, you almost certainly violate universal ethical standards of decency. [Vide infra]

"X" wrote the following to his sister, the member of his family he thought most open-minded:

Dear __:
  The following is a copy of an e-mail I just sent to my son. The incident I refer to near the end occurred at a party at [my son's] residence. It was the last time I saw him and may partially explain why this is so.
  I will give a very brief account of the incident. A guest, someone I'd never seen before, started asking intrusive questions when she discovered I wasn't a community college teacher like most of the people there. She persisted even when it was clear that I was uncomfortable with what seemed to be an insinuation that I didn't belong there. When she managed to work in a reference to someone she knew who was also--her exact words--"funny looking," the two guests to my left were visibly shocked. My son and my daughter-in-law were sitting right there at the table while this happened.
  The following e-mail may explain things my family seems not to understand. Or it may not.

__:
  The issue is the discrimination against my people. My position is that a double standard is not acceptable, and in consequence I am no more to be expected to accept discrimination than an African American would be.
  We have examples of this double standard in the press. The phrase, "I don't care if it harelips the governor" is clearly defamatory. If this is not clear, ask yourself if it would be defamatory of the n-word was substituted for the h-word. The phrase appeared in the print edition of Time a dozen years ago, it is in the blockbuster movie "Casino," and in modified form in the classic movie "Dr. Strangelove."
  Would the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, and Jesse Jackson have allowed this if the phrase was "I don't care if it [n-word's] the governor?" If the answer is no, then the phrase constitutes an unmistakable example of a case where our normal, decent, respectable society displays a double standard concerning defamation of my people, as contrasted with defamation of African Americans. Just as other discriminatory behavior does, defamation of character degrades and intimidates the people it targets. The [a government agency] anti-harassment policy prohibits any effort to "degrade and intimidate" an employee. And respectable society acts as if it does know that "I don't care if it harelips the governor" (which still appears on time.com in an article by the supposedly liberal columnist Molly Ivins) is discrimination.
  This is my first point. Respectable society--not only the conservative right, but equally the supposedly liberal left, which is silent on this issue--accepts discrimination against certain groups, including my people. Respectable society's conscience was raised concerning people of color and women, but it has never been raised concerning other people, including those with cleft palates. There is still a civil rights battle to be waged. Defamation of character is targeting, and it is, as documented above, still socially acceptable to target my people, even though such discrimination, as Sociologist Erving Goffman said in Stigma, causes my people to have reduced "life chances."
  Respectable society, that is, discriminates against my people, and because this discrimination is not recognized, it is invisible. It is socially acceptable, and because it is acceptable, there is often backlash against anyone who draws attention to it. If a person with a cleft palate objects to any aspect of the pervasive, unconscious discrimination against us, he or she is blamed, and accused of something, such as being "anti-social."
  In this sense, since discriminatory conduct is always unjust and unethical, regardless of whether it is socially acceptable, respectable society's acceptance of the above defamation of my people is unjust and unethical. It is, to put a word to it, indecent. As a consequence, to be decent, every person has to make their own ethical decisions. One can't say, "it's all right because it is socially acceptable." The history of the socially acceptable demonstrates this. It was socially acceptable, when I was in high school, to be racist in Mississippi. It was socially acceptable, when my dad was in college, to be anti-Semitic in Hitler Germany. If you are conformist, you almost certainly violate universal ethical standards of decency. If you have the habit of adulating the recognized leaders of your in-group, you will likely be emulating unrecognized discriminatory behavior.
  My second point is that decent people object to all discriminatory conduct, even if such objection results in their incurring social disapproval. They have the moral courage to resist social pressure.
  I have several examples of this, and I will give you one of them: One day, when I was a cashier at Toys R Us, a businesswoman and her ten-ish son came to my counter. When he saw me the boy, without thinking, made a sound like a raspberry, but more sloppy and mucous-y. His mother immediately realized what he had done and, while the line waited, she knelt down in her suit to his level and explained to him why decent people did not do what he had just done. It took her awhile, because she recognized that this could be an important event in her son's life as a morally autonomous, responsible person.
  In a subsequent e-mail I will describe to you an incident in which what was unmistakable discriminatory behavior against your father occurred right in front of you. It has been treated as if it was socially acceptable, that is, as if it didn't happen. This is why I wrote that I don't see you as "marching to the sound of a different drummer when social values are debased and venal."
  Your response to my last e-mail, your catalog of your virtues, doesn't address this issue, which M.L. King described as the situation where "good people stand by and do nothing."
  My people live socially isolated, embattled lives because "respectable" society defines away defamation of character and other discriminatory behavior. In the above example, a well-dressed woman who was a total stranger showed courage and decency as soon as she saw discriminatory behavior taking place. Is it too much to ask that my family do as much when it sees social wrongdoing against their own flesh and blood?

"X" relates that his sister's and his son's response was breast-beating sympathy with the plight of his people. He adds that subsequently they doubled down on the behavior he had described to them.

To cite the first post in this weblog, Social Attitudes and the Disability Cohort:

In Plessy v. Ferguson, the first Justice Harlan wrote:

Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.  In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.

Yet we have among us people we see every day, who are members of a targeted minority, but are not, as Prosecutor Fitzsimmons' comment reveals, in a protected class (there do not seem to be civil rights cases regarding them). That should not make a difference in how we treat the disabled. But it does: The most horrifying aspect of Molly Ivins' offhand remark is that everybody understands it. If it was possible to "harelip" the governor, it is understood that person would be outside the protections and considerations we afford those of "normal" identity.