When families don’t support a member with a disability

A family which adopts an African American would be expected to stand up for her in the case of racism or other discriminatory treatment. If they responded to slurs or other expressions of social disapproval with the attitude, Why are you always embarrassing us? Why don’t you have the social skills to handle these situations? Why are you such a loser? — They would obviously be in the wrong. They would be failing to honor family responsibility. They would be part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Such a family, having a minority member, would be itself racist because it had the same prejudicial attitudes and behaviors as the mainstream society.

The situation is parallel for a family when one of its children is born with cerebral palsy, cleft palate, or other disability. The family would be expected to stand up for her in the case of derogatory remarks, slights, or other discriminatory treatment. If they responded to slurs or other expressions of social disapproval with the attitude, Why are you always embarrassing us? Why don’t you have the social skills to handle these situations? Why are you such a loser? — They would obviously be in the wrong. They would be failing to honor family responsibility. They would be part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Here’s an instance: The family of a Person With A Cleft Palate (a PWACP) unfortunately has a nearly perfect record of avoiding its responsibility with regard to their daughter’s cleft palate.

To start with, the family refuses to discuss any issue having to do with cleft palate. When someone calls her "pendeja" on the bus, she knows better than to mention it. When the State driver’s license photographer says "cheese, whiskey, harelip," she knows better than to mention it. When a resident who wasn’t even born when she moved into her building calls the manager on her while she’s waiting for a family member to arrive, she knows better than to mention it.

When the family keeps her out of the loop, that’s disability discrimination.

Her email "sent" list contains many items to siblings or her children where she attempts to get feedback on the most important factor in their sister’s or mother’s life, and the response is a disapproving silence.

That’s disability discrimination. Worse, this precludes taking the first step to resolve the problem: bringing the problem up. The attitude is, Why are you always embarrassing us? Why don’t you have the social skills to handle these situations? Why are you such a loser?

But as a PWACP she’s not allowed to defend herself from these implied accusations. She’s not even allowed to bring them up.

For many people with disabilities, particularly those with birth defects, mainstream social behavior expects them to be humble and apologetic, not to make a big deal about marginalizing and disenfranchising attitudes and treatment, not to rock the boat. If the stigmatized disabled yield to social pressure, they perpetuate habitual mainstream discrimination and civil rights violation.

If they resist, if they object, if they speak out, society isolates them as antisocial, as troublemakers. That’s the birth defect Catch-22. A responsible, supportive family helps.

But all too often their families see disabled members with the same cold, hostile attitude as prevailing society.

The role of behavior in sexual assault and disability assault

There are parallels between #MeToo and disability discrimination. In both cases the abuse of a targeted minority is in many ways an effect of mainstream social behavior.

In both cases things which people _know_ happened are unhappened by habitual social pretense. You saw a respectable man swipe his hand down a woman’s crotch, but it would be in bad taste to make an issue of it. 

Someone subjects the only disabled person at the party to intrusive, derogatory questions, and the group pretends that this is just friendly interest. 

The person with the disability is publicly humiliated, effectively reduced to a pariah and an outcast right in front of everybody, but the attitude is that this is normal social action. 

“The community” legitimizes the civil rights violation which has occurred by countenancing it. If the person who has just been abused calls the indifferent partygoers out on what they just did, she is treated as a bad sport. 

It all works, for objectified women, or marginalized members of America’s largest minority,(1) because of _behavior_. Our social standards enable shabby treatment of those who don’t matter very much.

Thousands of cases of covering up what people know about, of casual social acceptance, hid from us the fact that large numbers of women were experiencing sexual assault right under our noses. 

Exactly the same situation obtains with the millions who have disabilities. The difference is that it’s not a thing. There’s no #UsToo.

(1) America’s largest minority, according to the Department of Labor and the ADA:

http://www.dol.gov/odep/pubs/fact/diverse.htm

http://www.adainfo.org/sites/default/files/Leadership-Network/Modules-1-5/5a-America-largMinorityFINAL.pdf

The mother of a disabled woman reveals the pervasive disrespect for the largest minority

Frank Verpaelst of the Federation of Disabled Bloggers on Facebook:

“I sit here fuming in my chair after having read a recent message from a disabled friend, telling me a story of how her mother mused out loud “How can an able-bodied woman love a disabled man who has very short legs and no arms? He’s not a real man! How does she do it?””

Would her mother have said a racial minority was not a real man? Probably not, because we’ve had a civil rights revolution. But there’s unconscious acceptance of a double standard: it’s ok to express a slur about a disabled person in a way that disparaging a person of color is not. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 didn’t mention the disabled. Many feel that the idea that disabled people have the same rights as people of color would be racist, although Martin Luther King knew better, proclaiming, Injustice anywhere endangers justice everywhere.

The Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws applies to disabled people or it is meaningless.

Many people with disabilities have loving and supportive families who help them deal with a world which is often biased and unfriendly. Sadly, in this case the mother of a disabled woman exemplifies what is too often the reality of family discrimination. That’s what expressing a negative attitude about a disabled person to one’s disabled daughter conveys.

If "Money is speech," much of our taxes is unconstitutional compelled speech

The disabled are America’ largest minority. Yet the law does not treat this minority as it does those minorities that matter, by placing it in a protected class and affording adverse circumstances with heightened scrutiny.

If, as the law of the land holds, money is speech, we disabled are often paying through our taxes for a system which, so far as I have been able to learn, has never had a landmark disability civil rights court case comparable to the racial minority rights case, Brown vs. Board of Education. The racial rights case was badly needed, but ours is overdue.

Previous posts document silencing, shunning, tolerated efforts to demean and degrade, medical discrimination, and double standards across the board. We have exactly the same rights as the other minorities do, but by the compelled speech of our legally mandated taxes, we are forced to support a system which treats us as second class citizens.

Below is a copy of an article on tax money as compelled political speech;

To our Court: Our taxes constitute un-Constitutional compelled speech

“Money is speech.”
Under this unsupportable rule-by-judges dogma, because of tax mandated by law:
I am “speaking” Trump, though I and eleven million of my fellow Americans voted for someone else (three million more for email Benghazi Hillary, eight million for the green or Sanders contingents).

I am “speaking” concentration camps for poor innocent children separated from their parents, although even the Nazis never did that.

I am “speaking” deficit-financed tax cuts for the one percent, which will oppress our children with catastrophic trillion dollar debts.

I am “speaking” not “government of the people, by the people, for the people” — the first Republican President’s mantra — but government of the heartless rich, by the filthy rich, for the treasonous rich.

I am “speaking” not “all are created equal,” but rich white preppies born to wealth, privilege, and court clerkships shall be protected by the Senate Judicial Committee, by Mitch McConnell, and the FBI — all supported by The People’s tax dollars — not only from consequences of sexual assault for which thousands of lower class adolescent males are now languishing in adult detention facilities, but even from having their mocking abuse of young women brought to the _attention_ of the American people.

Wherefore:

That portion of my public taxes which “speaks” what I oppose with all my heart shall under NO circumstances represent what the Founders decried as “taxation without representation.”

Those taxes which constitute un-Constitutional compelled speech shall be sequestered. Neither I nor any other citizen of the land of the free shall be compelled to pay taxes for a cause which shocks the conscience.

It’s a free country.