A Preliminary Note on Sources

For example, there is a UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It states: “All members of society have the same human rights – they include civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights.” In other words, if an action, policy, or attitude would be wrong for minorities, women, or LGBTQ people, it is wrong for disabled people or people with birth defects. If the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws is implemented as protected class, then disabled people or people with birth defects should be clearly identified as being in a protected class; and they should be as highly ranked in the politics of identity as, for example, people of color.

Why is it necessary to have a Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities?: “The Convention is necessary in order to have a clear reaffirmation that the rights of persons with disabilities are human rights and to strengthen respect for these rights.  Although existing human rights conventions offer considerable potential to promote and protect the rights of persons with disabilities, it became clear that this potential was not being tapped.  Indeed, persons with disabilities continued being denied their human rights and were kept on the margins of society in all parts of the world.   This continued discrimination against persons with disabilities highlighted the need to adopt a legally binding instrument which set out the legal obligations on States to promote and protect the rights of persons with disabilities.” (Emphasis added)

Note: America has done well concerning disability access, as What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement - Fred Pelka, 2012, documents. However, the civil rights of disabled people — protection against comments and gesturing intended to demean, degrade, marginalize, and disenfranchise disabled people — have been neglected. Where needed American civil rights law is lacking, there may be recourse to standards documented by the United Nations.

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“A University of Windsor law professor could become the first person to represent Canada on the United Nations' Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The federal government announced last week that Canada has nominated disability advocate and legal scholar Laverne Jacobs as a candidate to serve on the committee.

The 18-person committee features experts from all over the world. If Jacobs is elected at a conference in June of next year, she would serve a four-year term.

Jacobs, who joined CBC Radio's Windsor Morning on Monday, said she was "honoured and humbled" to have been selected.

UN Disability Nominee: One of Windsor's most respected university professors has been nominated for a prestigious United Nations post. Laverne Jacobs is Canada's nominee to join the UN's Committee on Rights of Persons with Disabilities. She speaks with Tony Doucette about what it means, and what she hopes to accomplish, if elected.

The committee plays an important role in implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Jacobs explained. It reviews reports on different countries and provides recommendations on the convention, and it also receives complaints and conducts inquiries related to allegations of human rights abuses.”

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Podcast: How Cleft Lips and Palates Work
Stuff You Should Know

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-cleft-lips-and-palates-work/id278981407?i=1000523019928

In the podcast “Stuff you should know,” accessible in any podcast app

After Ira Glasser retired in 2001, the liberal ACLU was transformed into a left organization, “undemocratic and unaccountable”

How the ACLU ceased defending the Bill of Rights and, concerned with winning popularity contests, became an antiliberal progressive organization owing more to Marx than the Magna Carta. “Let the government abrogate the free speech rights of one group, however odious, [as in no-platforming] and it will do it again, possibly in the case of someone you like.”

James Kirchick: Adopting a scrupulously content-neutral approach to the defense of free speech is guaranteed to upset people across the political spectrum, but it was a price [ACLU head Ira] Glasser and his colleagues were willing to pay. Religious conservatives like Buckley fumed at the ACLU for arguing on behalf of flag-burners and blasphemous artists, while [progressives] were confounded by its insistence that neo-Nazis had the right to goose-step past the homes of Holocaust survivors. But the defense of the First Amendment was far too important to leave to those concerned with winning popularity contests. …

[Their] commitment to civil liberties [is now] primarily if not exclusively a function of partisan politics. …

Then as now, Glasser was at pains to remind the ACLU’s critics that it was not “defending Nazis” in the Skokie affair. It was defending the First Amendment, which remains valid independent of whomever exercises it. Let the government abrogate the free speech rights of one group, however odious, and it will do it again, possibly in the case of someone you like.

Almost immediately following Glasser’s July 2001 retirement, however, the organization started to slip. … Unlike the 1970s, when the ACLU was run by stubbornly principled people who refused to buckle under the weight of fashionable opinion or donor pressure, the new generation of leaders prioritized conformism over intellectual consistency.

“My successor, and the board of directors that have supported him, have basically tried to transform the organization from a politically neutral, nonpartisan civil liberties organization into a progressive … organization,” Glasser says about Anthony Romero,(1) an ex-Ford Foundation executive who continues to serve as the ACLU’s executive director. According to former ACLU national board member Wendy Kaminer in her 2009 book Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity, and the ACLU, Romero and his enablers routinely engaged in the sort of undemocratic and unaccountable  behavior practiced by the individuals and institutions the ACLU usually took to court, like withholding information (concerning a breach of ACLU members’ privacy, no less), shredding documents in violation of its own record-preservation and transparency procedures, and attempting to muzzle board members from criticizing the organization publicly. (“You sure that didn’t come out of Dick Cheney’s office?” remarked the late, great former Village Voice columnist and ACLU board member Nat Hentoff of this last gambit).

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Meghan Daum, in The Problem with Everything:

The American Civil Liberties Union, apparently confused about its purported mission of protecting the constitutional rights of all citizens, unleashed a tweet thread denouncing the rollback because “it promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused . . . We will continue to support survivors.”

Nonetheless, to hear the ACLU talking about “inappropriately favoring the accused,” even on a platform like Twitter, was nothing short of remarkable. To me, the nagging question was … why so many people and organizations were willing to override fundamental democratic principles in order to show that they were on the “right side” of an issue …

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(1) Apparently Leader for Life, as the autocratic Romero’s rule commenced twenty years ago.

Hat tip to the IndependenceChick blog’s well written articles concerning the rights of people having disabilities

 The author of the IndependenceChick blog writes, “critical race theory, with its Marxist roots and simplistic narrative of “you are either the oppressed or the oppressor.””

She asks, “how can I live in a society that says, “Because you are disabled, you are a perpetual victim and everyone else is oppressing you–except, of course, that you are also a white American, so you’re an oppressor–so everywhere you turn, you are basically a worthless piece of humanity?””

Neither the left nor the right serve disabled people well. The left’s “check your white privilege,” as IndependenceChick suggests, contains a hidden implied argument, Original Sin, and is thus incompatible with the presumption of innocence of liberal justice. Both left and right, it seems to me, assume that human life is a war of all against all.

Liberalism, exemplified in the Declaration and Constitution, by contrast, assumes that the human being is a rights-bearing creature entitled to the pursuit of happiness. Citizens can make a social contract and work together toward that end.

A current theme of the IndependenceChick blog is mainstream society’s tendency to impose gratuitous restraints on people having disabilities.

In an issue between a person having a cleft palate and _anyone_, the disabled person is almost certainly at a major disadvantage.

 A corollary of “I don’t care if it [h-words] the Governor”: I take it that the fact that the h-word was chosen over the n-word means that the general public considers the pervasively stigmatized birth defect to be a worse identity than the nation’s most targeted race. Other factors:

1. There are virtually no governmental or social institutions for adult people having a cleft.
2. Absence of legal prior art: “There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities.”
3. Either actually, or publicly regarded as, not in a protected class. Few or no cases at law concerning our civil rights.
4. Roughly one in seven hundred. Not enough to have any influence on politics.
5. Related absence of community. If I am typical, many clefted people don’t know anyone like them. And the mainstream people they know may be less than reliable friends.
6. Little or no social or legal cost to slighting us, abusing us, or having an attitude of disrespect toward us.
7. Some, perhaps most, of us have families that simply will not talk about cleft palate. That, in itself, is probably a civil rights violation. Such families have a significant tendency to turn a blind eye when bigoted people get on our case. Families should be part of the solution. Often they are instead part of the problem.
8. People having a cleft are often blamed and scapegoated. Sometimes they even considered guilty for the way they were born.
9. If a person of color targets a clefted person of a different race, the person being targeted may be accused of racism if they defend themselves.
10. An example of some of these things: I was in a state office having my drivers license picture taken. The state employee said, “Cheese, whiskey, [h-word].” I know a person of color my age. If the state representative had done the same thing, substituting the [n-word], he could have gone home and talked to a bunch of people who were in the same boat. The situation of us clefted ones is utterly different - anyone we might mention it to would probably get a pained expression, as if we’d violated a social rule.

Summary: In an issue between a person having a cleft palate and anyone, the disabled person is almost certainly at a major disadvantage.