A Recent Book on the Civil Rights of the Disabled

This is a collection of notes, with comments, from What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement - Fred Pelka, 2012

In the first post of this weblog, we wrote:

A 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. 

 As Pelka writes, "People with disabilities are an oppressed minority with protected rights." (p. 3) He continues:

Robert Funk . . . has recounted the history of what he calls "the humanization of disabled people" in America as the journey of individuals with disabilities from "objects of pity and fear . . . who are incapable and neither expected nor willing to participate in or contribute to society" to a "disability rights movement" which maintains that "disabled people have the constitutional and human right to equal citizenship, that is, the right to be treated as a person worthy of dignity and respect." (p. 4)

Our first post continued:

People with cleft palates bear two stigmas: the stigma of disability; and the stigma of birth condition, which is considered guilt by many. An example of the latter from the 1st Century: Paraphrasing John 9:2, "Master, did this man sin . . . that he was born thus?"

Pelka:

Americans with disabilities have generally found themselves, as the activist Justin Dart Jr. put it, the nation's "poorest, most oppressed group." ...

"The persistent thread within the Christian tradition," writes theologian and sociologist Nancy Eiesland, "has been that disability is either divinely blessed or damned: the defiled evildoer or the spiritual superhero." ... [In parts of the third world] religious tradition regards disability as a form of "divine punishment" for alleged sinfuless. (p. 5)

Social attitudes can render the disabled the scapegoats of our society:

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson: "According to [Melvin] Lerner, the human need for order and predictability gives rise to the belief that people get what they deserve or that the way things are is the way they should be....if something 'bad'—like having a disability—happens to someone, then there must be some 'good' reason—like divine or moral justice, for its occurrence." ... it results in victim-blaming and scapegoating of those who are different. (p. 6)

In This is the Son of Kings, we suggested that the classic tragedy Oedipus the King paralleled the traditional treatment of a baby with a club foot disability in some Greek city-states. Pelka:

According to [Henri-Jacques] Stiker, the religious systems of Graeco-Roman antiquity were even less tolerant . . . In both ancient Athens and Sparta infants with disabilities were "exposed," taken "outside to an unknown location and [left to]...expire in a hole in the ground or drown in a course of water." The birth of disabled infants was believed to "signal the possibility of misfortunes and are [sic] explained by the anger of the gods. Deformed infants are exposed because they are harmful, maleficent. They implicate the group." (pp. 6-7)

In Internalized Discrimination: You're Not Supposed to SAY That, we suggested a powerful social pressure to remain silent. Pelka:

Robert Garland: "[The disabled were generally held in disdain] both by their families and by society at large. ... The disabled themselves were encouraged to feel a certain shame for their own physical condition." Disability rights activists today would call this "internalized oppression"—the absorption by oppressed people of the judgments and assumptions of the majority culture. p. 7

In the last note taken so far from Pelka's book:

Tim Cook: "Persons with disabilities were believed to simply not have the 'rights and liberties of normal people.'" (p. 11)

In a post November 26, 2014 we wrote:

“Spoiled Identity”: When the Disabled Are Not In “A State of Society” - In Pauline Maier's American Scripture we find:

In June 1776 the Virginia Convention ... amended the ... draft so it said that "all men are by nature equally free and independent" and had "certain inherent rights" ... "when they enter into a state of society." The statement ... freed the state of Virginia from an obligation to recognize and protect the inherent rights of slaves since ... slaves had never entered Virginia's society, which was confined to whites. - Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, p. 193 (Emphasis added)

The post continues:
What is significant here is that the basic human rights—normal human rights—are not guaranteed simply because a person is human, but only if society accepts the person. The "spoiled identity" which sociologists recognize in such stigmatized people as the disabled, and especially those with birth defects, often means a specific lifetime exclusion from society. The results, as implied by the following defamatory passage from the Time Magazine web site, can be devastating:

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

The sociologist notes that the effect is reduced "life chances": 

Goffman [says] “The term stigma, then, will be used to refer to ... a special kind of relationship between attribute and stereotype” (2). [1] Observing that “the person with stigma is not quite human” (3), Goffman explains that the our unconscious assumptions lead us to “exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce his life chances.”