In the News: Disability Discrimination

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

A human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only. - James Agee

Reciprocity principle: If a remark or an action or an attitude would be seen as discriminatory if directed toward a minority, it is discriminatory for us. We have exactly the same civil rights, even if the justice system does not act as if we do. - Introduction: Social Attitudes and the Disability Cohort

In Introduction: Social Attitudes and the Disability Cohort I observed:

Our society, in part with the aid of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), is respectful with certain other types of disabilities. A couple years ago I used public transport in such European cities as Berlin, Budapest, Vienna, Munich, Paris, and Amsterdam. There was virtually no wheelchair accommodation. Characteristically, when I saw someone in a wheelchair, someone was along to help. Here, we wait patiently while a bus loads someone in a wheelchair (as decent people should). It is socially unacceptable to stare (again, as it should be). As with AIDS, an ethical public relations campaign has largely removed the stigma from these disabilities.

Not entirely. From Andrew Sullivan's Blog, two days ago:

John List and Uri Gneezy conducted a series of experiments to evaluate discrimination against disabled people seeking car repairs:

[W]e recruited several men between the ages of twenty-nine and forty-five to act as our secret agents. Half these men used wheelchairs and drove specially equipped vehicles. The other half were non-disabled, but in all cases the individuals hopped into a specially equipped vehicle for the disabled with a fresh ding on the side and headed to Chicago-area repair shops.

When our secret agents got to an auto repair shop they simply asked for a price quote to fix their car. What we found initially was shocking. The disabled were given quotes 30 percent higher than the quotes given to non-disabled for the exact same repair!

A more general case: 

As of today, if you’re disabled you can no longer go straight to the front of the line for all of your favorite rides at Disney World. It may sound like a callous joy-revoking move from the home of the Magic Kingdom, but, then again, the reason for the change is pretty appalling. Families, fully capable of waiting in line like everyone else, were scamming their way to the front of the line by, wait for it, hiring disabled–or perhaps more appropriately "disabled”–tour guides. The TODAY show went undercover this summer to expose the practice.

Here’s what they found:

Last May's investigation began with ads found on Craigslist in which tour guides bragged about their "disabled passes": "Let's cut the Disney lines together," "access to special entrances." Going undercover at Disneyland, the TODAY producer and his family hired two of those guides, with home video cameras rolling.

"I'm here to make sure everyone has fun at Disneyland and we get on as many rides as possible," one of the guides, named Mara, told the producer and his family. "I have a special card that's going to help us beat the lines." And she charged $50 to do it, getting them straight past long lines at such attractions as the Mad Tea Party ride. ...

When confronted one of the guides told TODAY: "We live in a capitalist country, and I don't feel like it's morally wrong."

This is a known moral two-step. Capitalism, of itself, is essentially amoral. As Dickens documented, in an earlier phase it cannibalized  its own work force through child labor. Our liberal society can tolerate capitalism only because it is heavily regulated. Morality is imposed on capitalism from outside by insider trading laws, the forty-hour work week, child labor laws, and various formal provisions against false advertising and fraud, among other strictures. The late journalist Henry Fairlie dissected this notion that "We live in a capitalist country" could in any sense be an ethical standard. In How Fares the Republic: The Liberal View of the Market:

For those who glorify “the market,” [Fairlie observed], “the purpose is always the same, to leave the economic realm in command over all others, to explain all human impulse, as it is expressed in the political process, in terms of nothing more than the ‘acquisitive instinct.’ ... they are in bondage to an economic view of human aspiration against which they have no defense once the supremacy of the political realm has been surrendered.”

We should always resist the triumph of the “economic view,” of the valorization of private gain at the expense of the public good, over the political and ethical realm.

On another weblog, In Retrospect: The Supreme Court and The Disabled documented a case in which the august Supreme Court slighted the disabled by interpreting away much of what little legal protection the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 provides:

In 2008, the year of Obama's first presidential election, the American Congress took action to remind the Supreme Court of the intent of existing disability employment law. Under the headline, Congress Passes Bill With Protections for Disabled, the New York Times wrote:

The bill expands the definition of disability and makes it easier for workers to prove discrimination. It explicitly rejects the strict standards used by the Supreme Court to determine who is disabled.

The bill declares that the court went wrong by “eliminating protection for many individuals whom Congress intended to protect” under the 1990 law.

“The Supreme Court misconstrued our intent,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the House Democratic leader. “Our intent was to be inclusive.” ...

Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, the chief sponsor of the bill, said: “The Supreme Court decisions have led to a supreme absurdity, a Catch-22 situation. The more successful a person is at coping with a disability, the more likely it is the court will find that they are no longer disabled and therefore no longer covered under the A.D.A.”

The first post in this weblog specified an emphasis on the subset of the disabled who are especially stigmatized, generally because the disability results from a birth condition:

While the primary focus will be as the blog title suggests, this blog is about all of us who bear stigma because we are physically different—little people (Google "dwarf tossing"), those we call retards, those we call spastics, those we label with the h-word, as the late Ms. Ivins does above, and others—who are, as her folksy phrase implies, pervasively targeted in our society. These pages are about the civil rights of this Disability Cohort. This weblog seeks to document the current "I don't care" climate of disability discrimination, and to propose solutions.

But as the above examples reveal, there persists general disability discrimation among the "normal," "decent" people of our post-civil-rights-revolution society. For some possible remedies, see: Imagine That America Had Its Consciousness Raised