The public discrimination against the CPs, cerebral palsy and cleft palate, is fairly well known. In 2013, a post quoted an ABC News/Yahoo article concerning “teasing and taunting a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy”:
An Ohio man faces one month of jail time for teasing and taunting a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy after a video of the incident went viral.
On Nov. 27, Judge John A. Poulos of the Canton Municipal Court sentenced 43-year-old William Bailey to 29 days in jail. ...
William Bailey "was dragging his leg and patting his arm across his chest to pick his son Joseph up," said [Tricia] Knight. "I asked him to please stop doing this. 'My daughter can see you.' He then told his son to walk like the R-word." ...
The next day Knight posted the video on her Facebook page while [Knight's mother-in-law, Marie] Prince uploaded the video they called "Bus Stop Ignorance" to YouTube. Within days, the video went viral. ...
"I think when we look at cases, there's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But when there's nothing out there regarding disabilities, it took me a little bit longer to come to a decision." ...
As for whether this case presents a new precedent in Ohio is another debate.
"I don't know if it sets a precedent so much maybe as it begins a conversation between people," said [Jennifer] Fitzsimmons [the chief assistant city prosecutor for this case]. "I think conversation starts progress, and I think if it can bring something else to light, it would be good."
The other CP, cleft palate, has its own derogatory catch-phrase: “I don’t care if it [h-words] the Governor.” Other people having a disability at times encounter pariah affect, being treated as not part of the community, or being subject to slurs such as “crip,” “retard,” or the all-purpose “misfit.” To be stigmatized, as the sociologist Erving Goffman noted, is to have “a spoiled identity.”
“Social justice,” offered as a remedy by the left but not by liberalism, tends not to work for people having disabilities because the politics of identity doesn’t work for spoiled identities (this is why liberalism does not practice politics of identity, or extrajudicial “social justice”).
Another problem disabled people have in America is that, perhaps beginning with the Civil Rights Act of the mid-sixties, the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of the equal protection of the laws has been increasingly implemented as protected class, despite Justice Harlan’s assertion, in Plessy, that “our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Although the Department of Labor and other Federal websites observe that the disabled are America’s largest minority, the mainstream public thinks that “minorities” - people of color, women, and LGBTQ - are in a protected class, and not to be messed with; and that people having disabilities are not in this sense off limits if you’re looking for someone you can be mean to. The neighbor of the little girl with cerebral palsy, above, thought he could verbally abuse her with impunity.
The mainstream public’s belief that, for example, doing a number on someone having a disability is not as serious as doing the same thing to a racial minority is reflected in the “benign neglect” of the formal justice system. Above, Assistant Prosecutor Jennifer Fitzsimmons noted that there was “case law regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But … there’s nothing out there regarding disabilities.”
Not in a protected class. Little or no social pressure against attempting to demean, degrade, or humiliate. Doors slammed in our faces by normal, decent people. The Social Blind Eye that ignores when this happens. And at law, “there’s nothing out there regarding disabilities.”
A powerful voice can change the narrative concerning injustice. Martin Luther King accomplished this concerning the major injustice of his time. At present we have a spoiled identity and are outside of society and outside the law. The narrative can be changed. It needs to be.
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