The religious notion of Original Sin and the cleft palate community.

The doctrine of Original Sin appears in two Abrahamic religions of the First World, the religion of the Israelite tribes, which by the first century of the Common Era had been named Judaism; and the religion based on a first century practitioner of that religion, Jesus of Nazareth, Christianity.

A common expression in these religions is, Through Adam (the symbolic first man) did all men sin; every person is born inheriting this sin. We, until Christian salvation, are all sinners.

Disabled people, particularly so. Consider the passage from the Gospel of John in the Christian scriptures, where Jesus is confronted with a man born disabled. “Master,” the people ask, “who sinned, this man, or his parents, that he was born thus?”

Particularly for clefted people, by and large physically able except for the social stigma (implied in the catchphrase “I don’t care if it h-words the Governor), Original Sin can produce a kind of knee-jerk discrimination at the very outset of our social interactions.

In our medical care, the dogma of Original Sin can make a diagnosis of illness an accusation of illness.

A personal example. In middle age, the back pressure from prostate enlargement produced blood changes. I was sent to a specialist who said these changes were a multiple myeloma indicator. Although I asked if the prostate condition could be the cause, he performed a bone marrow biopsy and had me undergo a skeletal X-ray. Although a second opinion said the biopsy did not indicate cancer, and the X-ray didn’t find anything, he wanted to start chemotherapy. I insisted on waiting until we actually knew something.

Not only is the doctrine of Original Sin a harmful premise which frequently produces unfounded accusations, there are counter arguments in the very religions from which it arose; and in secular society it violates it violates a founding liberal principle: the presumption of innocence. I was attending the christening of a grandchild when, to my astonishment, the priest read a passage from the Torah/Tanakh which contradicted a dogma of his faith. Ezekiel 18 is an extended argument against Original Sin: “Yet say ye, Why? doth not the son bear the iniquity of the father? … The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, …But if the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die.” (Emphasis added)

Likewise, for Christians, in the parable of the prodigal son, Jesus is saying that he does not hold with the dogma of Original Sin either. Key passage: “He came to himself.” As in the passage from hundreds of years earlier, the key word is “turn.”

Original Sin makes a society which is inclined to be prejudicial toward the clefted even more so. But there are countervailing arguments in the very religions originating it, and our universal justice assures us that the presumption of innocence is our unalienable right.

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From the first post in this blog nine years ago:

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.

What someone targeted for being Muslim can teach those targeted for disability: The silence of the witnesses.

Tarunjit Singh Butalia on being harassed in the name of Christianity at a DMV office: “Despite being in a crowded room and others being able to hear this man harass me, no one intervened.”

“I privately spoke with a supervisor at the agency about the harassment I experienced — in what should have been a safe space open to everyone.

People of marginalized identities frequently experience hurtful and harmful situations when we’re merely trying to live our everyday lives.

I’ve learned from experience that teaching with facts to a strongly biased person in the moment of confrontation does not work.”

“I still worry that my DMV experience happened in public and around dozens of people. No one intervened, no one comforted me, no one confronted the aggressor who was screaming at me. I know these situations can be uncomfortable and, in the moment, sometimes people don’t know how to respond.

But what can you do when you encounter someone being harassed?”

“First, the person under attack needs solidarity. You can stand up and, instead of confronting the bigot, go to the person under duress, face them and block the sight of the bigot spewing hate. You can also offer words of support and ask if there’s anything you can do that would help them in the moment. None of this happened in my case.

Even after I completed my license renewal and walked across the waiting room to the door, not one person stepped up to say “I am sorry for what you went through.” That doesn’t mean folks in the room necessarily agreed with the screaming man. They just didn’t know what to do and how to react.” (Emphasis added)

“Unfortunately, inaction is one major reason bigots feel empowered to harm others. Next time you see this happen before you, step up and be an ally of the victim. The world runs because goodness exceeds evil.

Silence is complicity and feeds the normalization of hate. As is commonly said, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good people do nothing.” So please don’t be a part of the silent majority — instead, stand up, speak up and be an ally for those marginalized in our communities.” (Emphasis added)

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I recently asked an in-law who works in higher education but keeps their law license current via pro bono cases if clefted people are in a protected class. To my surprise, they indicated that we are. “Sometimes people don’t know how to respond” to cleft phobia - or other disability discrimination - because they don’t realize that people having a disability have the same civil rights as women, minorities, and LGBTQ people.

“Inaction is one major reason bigots feel empowered to harm others.” There are powerful taboos against our speaking up for ourselves (I felt them when starting this blog years ago). We are supposed to be humble and apologetic. Sometimes “teaching with facts to a strongly biased person in the moment of confrontation” does not work. And sometimes they’re just messing with you because they think you’re afraid to violate the taboo, and it works to come back at them in no uncertain terms. Certainly bigots deserve to be surprised. (Emphasis added)

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.

A brief note on pervasive social discrimination against people having disabilities.

 Liz Plank: “People with disabilities are one of the most underrepresented populations in local and federal government. You don’t have to look far to understand why, when demeaning and discriminating them based on their disability is the accepted status quo.”

A day in the life: Bullied at the grocery store

 A couple months ago the chain grocer where I shop mispriced the hummus I bought. When I brought it to the attention of the employee who oversees the self-checkout area, he said I’d have to go talk to the deli, which sold it. He suggested I might have looked at the price of a different brand of hummus.

I ate the overcharge.

A couple weeks ago I bought six containers of hummus. It rang up at a total of $9.00 more than the advertised price,“Tell me what I have to do to fix this,” I told him. “What do I have to do?”

He told I’d have to go work it out with the deli.

“Do I leave my (mostly rung up) cart here while I do this?” The employee ok’d that.

So I went to the deli and told them this particular brand was deceptively priced. “Come around out here and look at the label in front of it. It’s not the same as what you have in the machine that rings it up.”

They authorized the guy in the self checkout to correct the price, which he did.

The whole process had taken over half an hour and involved two sections of the chain store’s operation. Presumably the chain is now aware that one of its sections is involved in deceptive pricing, and another section has been stonewalling customers who bring it to the store’s attention. They may even be aware that, in addition to violating state law (RCW 19.94.230) regarding “deceptive pricing,” this unethical employee, in bullying an elderly, disabled customer, could have exposed the chain to a civil rights liability.

Clefted people, according to FHA/HUD, which oversees the over-55 apartments where I live, are impaired in “a major life function” in four ways: Appearance, eating, speaking, or considered as such.

The last covers disability stigma, the public prejudice which can cause even elderly, handicapped citizens to be bullied in the course of daily life.

What you can do when targeted by someone who thinks you aren’t in a protected class

 In June, 2013, this blog posted (Imagine That America Had Its Consciousness Raised), about What We Can Do.

Today, if someone gets on your case: HUD/FHA oversees the 55+ place I live. The application asked if I was disabled. Their sites say that disabled, “impaired in a major life function,” includes:

1. Speech
2. Eating
3. Appearance 
4. And considered to be disabled, which addresses prejudice and stigma.

So, if you don’t want to just let it go - sometimes the politic solution - you can point out that the United States Government considers you disabled, and frowns on targeting disabled people. Such targeting is discriminatory and could be a civil rights violation.

If others are standing by doing nothing, ask if they would let race, gender, or religious discrimination happen without objecting.

Andrew Sullivan’s view of gay stigma often resonates for cleft stigma

 Andrew Sullivan’s Out on a Limb:, Chapter The Politics of Homosexuality:

“There is no common discourse in which he can now speak, …” A beginning: If someone is getting on our case, and pretending that it isn’t because we are different, we can ask, “Are you being cleft-phobic?”

The mainstream, despite the civil rights revolution, still “pursues the logic of repression.”

Like homosexuality, cleft palate “does in fact exist as an identifiable and involuntary characteristic of some people, and that these people do not as a matter of course suffer from moral or psychological dysfunction,” nor are we guilty because of our difference.

One reason a “common discourse” is lacking is because of  “a politics of denial or repression. Faced with a sizable and inextinguishable part of society, it can only pretend that it does not exist, or needn’t be addressed, or can somehow be dismissed.” Ok, just 1 in 700. But name a program anywhere in the United States for adults with cleft palate.

Sullivan describes a gay politics of “theater and rhetoric”; we clefted sit abashed, humble and apologetic, and don’t do anything. “Acquiescence in repression,” Sullivan notes. “A psychological dynamic of supplication that too often only perpetuates cycles of inadequacy and self-doubt. … the notion that [our] equality is dependent on the goodwill of [our] betters. … A clear and overwhelming history of accumulated discrimination and a social ghetto that seemed impossible to breach.” (I don’t care if it h-words the Governor.)

“Facing their families and colleagues with integrity.” Yes. We should. Cleft Pride. “Full civic equality.” Shout out our “existence, equality, integrity.”

“America’s inherent hostility to gay people.” And to us, still: half a century after the civil rights revolution.

“Liberalism properly restricts itself to law—not culture—in addressing social problems.” And since the Equal Protection clause has been implemented as protected class, we must be in a protected class, even if the public doesn’t think so. Make that clear whenever someone insults or bullies you.

We don’t have a community: “A young heterosexual black or Latino girl invariably has an existing network of people like her to interpret, support, and explain the emotions she feels when confronting racial prejudice for the first time. But a gay child generally has no one. The very people she would most naturally turn to—the family—may be the very people she is most ashamed in front of.” Our small numbers - 1 in 700 - make us very alone. One of the first things the so far nonexistent program for adult clefted people should be a clearinghouse to put us in contact with each other.

“The country [should be] forced to debate a subject honestly—even calmly—in a way it never has before.”

Does the performative era exacerbate the pervasive public discrimination against the stigmatized disabled?

Black Columbia Professor John McWhorter’s Woke Racism’s explanation of Critical Race Theory describes it as an academic fad which is not constrained by evidence and reason: “It is a fragile, performative ideology, one that goes beyond the passages above to explicitly reject linear reasoning, traditional legal theorizing, and even Enlightenment rationalism. We are to favor an idea that an oppressed race’s “story” constitutes truth, in an overarching sense, apart from mere matters of empirical or individual detail.” The lack of cognitive constraints facilitates the targeting of anyone who can be accused of politically incorrect thinking or speaking. Why this matters for the civil rights of the stigmatized disabled is that it has ushered in an era of heightened self-righteous moralism. Not only can any difference from the conventional wisdom be characterized as utmost sinful heresy, McWhorter gives example after example of extreme punishment of anyone singled out for wrongthink. If such wrath can be visited on virtually any Ivy League student or professor who exercises freedom of speech, it creates a fear society which increases the pariahdom of a disabled minority which is already marginalized.

McWhorter gives many examples of extreme punishment which performative virtue signaling exacts for anything that can be construed as adverse to a race, gender, or sexual orientation:

“Thus, an obscure legal theory now feeds directly into a modus operandi that leads to indefensible suspensions, firings, and shamings nationwide.” Examples: “Is it necessary that the president and board chairman of the Poetry Foundation be forced to resign because the group’s statement in allegiance with Black Lives Matter after the Floyd murder was not long enough?” “Is it necessary that when, in 2018, a woman attended a party thrown by a Washington Post employee and wore blackface in ridicule of a recent comment by Megyn Kelly, she was not just called aside but cast into unemployment as a revolting heretic unworthy of civilized engagement? The blackface was unwise, to be sure—by the late 2010s it was no longer within the bounds of most educated people’s sense of humor to wear blackface even in irony. But still, the offender clearly intended it as signaling allegiance to the barrage of criticism against Kelly. Only in the late 2010s could this clumsy goof-up qualify as grounds for unemployment, with her callers-out claiming that she had made the party’s space “unsafe,” as if she had simply walked in corked up and saying she was Oprah. A few people at the party not only hounded her out but dedicated themselves to getting her fired from the newspaper for her transgression of etiquette. They succeeded, after even going as far as strong-arming the host of the party into revealing her name to them so that they could pursue her persecution.”

As in the case of the witch hunt that ensued when it was discovered that Virginia Governor Northam had appeared in blackface in a youthful peccadillo, responsible liberal voices might ask, “Where’s the path to redemption?”

“She had made the party’s space ‘unsafe’” (by appearing in blackface). There are people whose bigotry against disability makes them “offended” when, for instance, they encounter someone with a cleft. Could this justify their complaining to management that they should not have to labor in a “contaminated, offensive” workplace?

McWhorter describes: “Kangaroo court inquisitions, … psychological torture sessions seeking to purge people of improper thoughts, … obsessive policing of language.” That’s not an environment that bodes well for people considered “misfits” because of a birth condition.

McWhorter’s opening chapter: “As I write this in the summer of 2020, Alison Roman, a food writer for The New York Times, is on suspension. You might wonder just what a food writer could do to end up temporarily dismissed by her employer. Roman’s sin: In an interview, she passingly criticized two people for commercialism, model and food writer Chrissy Teigen and lifestyle coach Marie Kondo. Roman was Twitter-mobbed for having the nerve, as a white woman, to criticize two women of color. Teigen is half white and half Thai. Kondo is a Japanese citizen. Neither of them are what we typically think of as people of color in the sense of historically conditioned and structurally preserved disadvantage. However, in 2020, the mere fact of a white person criticizing not just one but two (apparently the plurality tipped the scales) non-white persons justified being shamed on social media and disallowed from doing her work. Roman, as a white person, was supposedly punching down—i.e., “down” at two people very wealthy, very successful, and vastly better known than her. Her whiteness trumped all, we were told. Roman, now typical of such cases, ate crow with an apologetic statement about how she had reflected and realized her error. Teigen even said that she did not think Roman deserved to be sanctioned. But no matter—a kind of fury, passed off as being “antiracist,” now has a supreme power in our public moral evaluations, and this required that Roman be pilloried in the town square. Her Wikipedia entry will forever include a notice that she was deemed a racist, billboard style, despite that most Americans likely see that she did nothing that remotely deserved such treatment, and despite that she would not have been treated that way as recently as a few years ago. She later left the Times permanently. What kind of people do these things? Why do they get away with it? And are we going to let them continue to?”

It is a short path from hair-trigger, self-righteous woke antiracism to a heightened readiness for ableist attacks on America’s largest minority. Social performativeness increases the “social tyranny” John Stuart Mill warned against in his classic study of liberty. It is bad for democracy, it is bad for the pursuit of happiness, it turns the land of the free and the home of the brave into a fear society.

A day in the life

 Experiences I’ve had that maybe you have too.

One gets hired for a position, and does well in it. Sooner or later there’s an office shuffle, and there’s a new supervisor. They’re cleft phobic, and make life hell - but nobody seems to notice.(1)

A simple ride on the city bus system goes south. I once took a seat near the front of the bus opposite a scrawny woman in a wheelchair. As the bus got rolling, she got out one of those little dollar bottles of gin and commenced trying to open it. She asked passengers to help. When she asked me, I smiled and demurred. No drinking on Metro Transit. “You are weak!” she said, and started repeating it in a loud voice, verbal abuse that surely the driver could hear. (I wondered if I should suggest to the driver that the civil rights of a disabled person were being violated on government property - but decided not to bother.)

You go to a party, and someone asks you what seems to be a friendly question. This turns into derogatory rhetorical questions, and instead of a happy occasion, you find yourself on the hot seat - people backing away. Presumably this doesn’t happen with minorities, women, or LGBTQ people - people in a protected class.

A stranger remarks, “I knew a guy like you” - another person who was “different” - clefted.

Even government offices aren’t safe. I was meeting with an employment counselor when their co-worker nearby loudly joked about a moustached employee’s “hair lip.” A State Driver’s License photographer said, “Cheese, whiskey, harelip.”

You are admitted to the graduate school of a public university, and as soon as they see you there’s a chill. I experienced this in both a Midwestern and a West Coast university. (A city university just starting its graduate program acted the way higher education ought to act, and I had no difficulty getting a graduate degree there.) Are universities in the performative era afraid that having certain kinds of disabled people bearing their credentials out into the world would harm their reputations? 

These things add up. They constitute stigma, and result in what Sociologist Erving Goffman called “reduced life chances.”

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(1) When I was working for the City Comptroller’s Office, I once came back from a week’s vacation to find co-workers acting a little strange. Finally, someone took me aside and said one of our people from across the hall had gone to my supervisor’s supervisor (a CPA, one of the ethical occupations) and complained about the way I was constantly being dressed down in front of everybody. The CPA said, “That’s a serious charge. It would need to be documented,” - and she pulled out a list of times and what was said.

Example of cleftphobia: “What’s a misfit doing at a party?”

“Public prejudicial discrimination—harassment—is an appeal to those present to share the harasser's opinion that there is something wrong with the person who is being singled out which renders them outside of society. That is why it is not the responsibility of the target of prejudice to defend themself socially—social negation is assumed. That is why it is the responsibility of any group, as soon as they realize it is possible that discrimination is taking place, to make it clear in no uncertain terms that discrimination is not accepted there.” - Personal note, 2008

Cleftphobia is often apparent at parties. One suddenly finds oneself on the hot seat. Interrogation pretending to be normal social curiosity—but the subtext is, ‘What’s a misfit doing at a party?’

It’s a strange life we the clefted live. Perhaps strangest is that we don’t talk about it.

In Public Man, Private Woman, the late Jean Bethke Elshtain said that in classical Greece, women did not have a public role. Women “did not have speeches,” was the way she put it.

Just to be a clefted person in a mainstream social gathering is anomalous. People go months without encountering one of us. They are quite unaware of what our lives are like, never knowing if the next stranger will be the one who does a number on us - finds a way to make it clear that they think misfits like us don’t belong.

The decent ones keep us at arm’s-length, carefully avoiding any sort of serious discussion. This is aided and abetted by the lack of a mode of discourse for engaging socially with a de facto subordinate, excluded, different subpopulation.

Example: On the way to a “soup dinner” occasionally hosted by an in-law, I made the mistake of making eye contact with a scrawny middle-aged woman in a wheelchair. When the bus started moving, she began trying to open one of those one-ounce bottles of gin. She asked one or two nearby passengers for assistance, then held the bottle out to me. I smiled regretfully (I used to work for the bus company, and it is illegal to consume alcohol on the bus).

She began verbal abuse. “You are weak,” over and over. Louder: “You are weak.” The bus driver could hear. (Should I have gone over to him and said, “a passenger is violating the civil rights of a disabled person right behind you?”)

I didn’t mention it at the partially family dinner either. Instead of arousing empathy, it would more likely have been seen as politicizing the occasion.

The massive social changes, which have made public conduct emphatically less civil, which have broken numerous guardrails concerning things which are not done because they violate the understood working of a functioning public space, are making things much worse for the stigmatized disabled. What the Founders called “toleration” has eroded, until the public feels it has a right not to see or hear anything whatsoever that might make them uncomfortable. Higher education, where the founding principle once was encountering new ideas that broadened the mind, now has an ever-expanding index prohibitorum of “hurtful” terms and conceptual positions.

This goes along with a rising belief that we shouldn’t have to deal with people whose differences make us feel uncomfortable, unless they’re in a protected class and we have to.

Near the end of a quarter century in my last apartment building, I was waiting in the lobby on Christmas Day for a family member. A young woman went through the lobby a couple times on the way to the laundry room. Then the apartment manager came out. She had complained about someone who shouldn’t be there.

It didn’t end with that. Someone messed with my door lock. “You’re the one” looks on the elevator. Someone figured out how to steal bandwidth from my hotspot.

People who hadn’t been born when I moved in believed that “the community” had the right to force whoever they didn’t like out.

We, like you, are as God made us. Please don’t target us for immutable conditions that we can’t change.

Term One for a discourse of the Fighting Disabled: “Cleftphobic,” “Cleftphobia.”

Are the practices of the left Cleft-Phobic?

The Politics of Identity isn’t about identity as you would understand it. It’s about Who’s Oppressed according to neo-Marxist doctrine. And The Community.

As a result, neo-Marxists don’t show solidarity with what Americans apparently think is the worst identity you can have. Neo-Marxists target what is actually considered the worst identity:

What was the last time you heard, “I don’t care if it h-words the Governor?” This familiar saying means that the worst thing that could happen to the Governor wouldn’t be to wake up black. It would be to wake up having ”a split upper lip,” “a cleft,” “funny looking,” a “misfit,” as a friend of my grandmother said; hence offensive to The Community.

And thus, under the coin of the realm of the Politics of Identity, victim status, the worst identity isn’t to be among those subject to the claimed structural racism of modern civilization — it’s those who offend The Community by being born with a birth defect that makes them funny looking to many in mainstream society.

Marxists say, I’m told, “In order to defeat the master you must use the master’s tools.”

Using progressives’ own terms — Your Politics of Identity doesn’t advance your cause because The Community isn’t a universal standard. It is a vested interest which practices “social justice” and group aggrandizement, instead of seeking the public good. The Community is social, tribal. “Our truth.” Being social, rather than public and civil, it practices what Mill identified as “social tyranny.”

The Politics of Identity is not about the liberal proposition that all “are created equal,” the universal principle that finally rendered slavery unthinkable, that made it “a crime against humanity.” No, the Politics of Identity continues the Marxist obsession with classes. Unequal classes. The Politics of Identity selects classes it believes victims of a power imbalance — women, minorities, LGBTQ people — and proclaims that some classes are more equal than others because they have victim status.

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“Our Constitution … neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” wrote Justice Harlan in Plessy, because class is whac-a-mole. Doesn’t provide “the equal protection of the laws,” but always leaves something out.

The catchphrases of the left, communitarian, segment of society support the class ranking system of the Politics of Identity rather than the equal protection provisions of the Constitution, to the disadvantage of socially despised classes having stigmatized disabilities.

What is the policy toward cleft palate people where you live? Who created it? Who administers it?

This morning, it occurs that this fundamental question hasn’t been answered in my city, my county, my state, my country. Are the clefted an interest group, a needs group, an identity, a resource, a “problem?”

A possible starting point. In my Pacific Northwest city, if you go to a dentist needing an upper plate, they direct you to the Faculty Prosthodontics center of the medical division of the state university. Parents having a newborn with a cleft are directed to Children’s Hospital in this city.

By contrast, the Disability Rights Washington website, according to a Google Site Search, does not mention “cleft,” “palate,” “hare,” “lip,” or any combination of these terms.

The United States has public programs structured for needs groups, such as the elderly; and members of an identity having perceived needs, such as minorities, women, and LGBTQ people. The first is general, public, and neutral, such as the statement beginning the Constitution: “We the People.” Social Security and Medicare do not suggest that elderly people are more worthy than the young; only that their reduced earning capacity and increased medical expenses need the general solution government can provide.

The second solution, in terms of identity, is less desirable from the standpoint of democracy.

The first problem for clefted people is that there is little or no unified social or governmental response to our civil rights needs, or our economic needs. By contrast, the civil rights needs of minorities are addressed, for example, by the Civil Rights Act of the sixties, by directed court attention, and by minority assistance programs. Do Faculty Prosthodontics, Children’s Hospital, and Disability Rights Washington coordinate? It is left up to the clefted person to figure out where to go.

Cleft people’s civil rights problems are suggested by the public attitude of the familiar “I don’t care if it h-words the Governor”(1) slur. I asked an attorney who specializes in “disability discrimination cases in higher education” if she knew of any cases where the courts had addressed the pervasive public discrimination against clefted people. Her emailed response evaded the issue. A 2013 post in this blog cited an ADA: “There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities.”

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Initial thoughts concerning what an initial program for the one in seven hundred who have a cleft might address:

1. Provide a clearinghouse where people having a cleft can contact each other

2. Provide someone clefted people can contact to evaluate incidents which may be discriminatory

3. Provide a resource for determining if effective action can be taken to counteract discrimination

4. Resources who can intercede for targeted disabled people. Could pro bono legal assistance be leveraged when civil rights may be being infringed?

5. Counteract the pressure clefted people are under to keep silent

6. Develop a cleft discourse (example: Should pervasive negative reaction to clefted people, where found, be described as “cleftphobic?”)

7. Promote public awareness that cleft people have exactly the same rights as minorities, women, and LGBTQ people

8. Determine what legal precedent exists where cleft civil rights may have been violated

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(1) In this slur, the American public doesn’t imply that the worst fate for the Governor would be to wake up as a person of color, but to wake disfigured by a cleft.

In the politics of identity, victim status is what counts. The public seems to regard disfigurement as a greater disadvantage than race.

What Happens When the Supreme Court of the U.S. Gets It Wrong?

Angela Van Etten: “When Congress enacted the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990 they adopted the same definition of disability used in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. They expected that courts would follow Rehabilitation Act caselaw when deciding who is disabled. Shockingly this did not happen. Instead courts narrowly interpreted the disability definition leaving many ADA claimants without justice.

As a result, discrimination against people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder, blood cancer, major depression, diabetes, epilepsy, learning disabilities, multiple sclerosis, and sleep apnea went unchecked.

A diabetic could be denied coverage due to the mitigating measure of taking insulin leading to the absurd result that an employer could refuse an accommodation request to take a break to administer insulin because the employee was not disabled!”

The Court has failed to give disability due consideration before. In 2013 this blog’s post In Retrospect: The Supreme Court and the Disabled noted, “ These … articles described case after case where the august Court cruelly denied protection to disabled individuals even though the intent of the Americans With Disabilities Act should have been clear. As the Times noted, The court went wrong by “eliminating protection for many individuals whom Congress intended to protect” under the 1990 law. Senator Tom Harkin: “The Supreme Court decisions have led to a supreme absurdity.” The question these articles brings to mind is, Why the needless cruelty of these excessively narrow interpretations?”

Reference: ADA Amendments Act of 2008 (ADAAA)