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.

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)

Disability prejudice in intellectual history

In the mid-Nineties, the USENET forum Rec.Arts.Books was dominated by hardcore Decon/Pomo people who talked about Theory as the goal toward which all intellectual history had been striving. Among their gods, besides Plato, Derrida, Foucault, and Heidegger, was Friedrich Nietzsche, who was openly bigoted against people having disabilities:

“The invalid is a parasite on society. In a certain state
  it is indecent to go on living. To vegetate on ... after
  ... the right to life has been lost ought to entail the
  profound contempt of society.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
- The Twilight of the Idols

"The weak and ill-constituted shall perish, first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so." - Nietzsche, The Antichrist

The academic humanities today still seem to be illiberal. “No platforming” is content-based censorship violating liberal principles of the First Amendment, for example.

In Why We Are Not Nietzscheans, Andre Comte-Sponville finds Nietzsche illiberal:

  “Justification of slavery: "Every enhancement of the type 'man' has
  so far been the work of an aristocratic society — and it will be so
  again and again: a society that believes in the long ladder of an
  order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and
  that needs slavery in some sense or other." ... Advocacy of
  oppression: "The essential characteristic of a good and healthy
  aristocracy . . . is that it . . . accepts with a good conscience
  the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be
  reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to
  instruments.”

Nor is it only Nietzsche. Plato discusses five types of regimes (Republic, Book VIII). They are Aristocracy, Timocracy, Oligarchy, Democracy, and Tyranny. Democracy is next to last.

Plato’s illiberalism comes from his concept of reality. The underlying Forms of what we think is real - chairs, tables - are what is truly real. What we can see and touch belongs to the realm of appearances. Because only philosophers can perceive the Forms, Plato said, a Philosopher King should rule. Because the working material of scientists - real physical systems - belongs to the realm of appearances, Plato questioned their validity.

The first academic lived in the first culture to have democracy and science, but was opposed to both, bequeathing a strain of illiberalism whose effects can still be detected in the academic humanities today.

We were left out of the Civil Rights revolution. Tell people that.

Huffington Post: ““It’s natural to wish for life ‘to just get back to normal’ as a pandemic and economic crisis upend everything around us,” Obama said. “But we have to remember that for millions of Americans being treated differently on account of race is tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal’ — whether it’s while dealing with the health care system, or interacting with the criminal justice system, or jogging down the street, or just watching birds in a park.””

Also, “for millions of Americans being treated differently on account of disability is tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal’.”

If I were to meet former President Obama, whom I whole-heartedly support, I would suggest that people having disabilities should also be part of the narrative.

I recently posted the following comment to a much-lauded anodyne article on a disability forum:

I see the [Forum] addressing access issues but not civil rights issues: The right of disabled people not to be demeaned, degraded and marginalized. The same people who wouldn’t think of commenting and gesturing about minorities, women and LGBTQ people often have no scruples about regarding disabled people as stigmatized and risible.
The narrative needs to be changed, something that bloggers with writing skills should be able to set about doing. A landmark civil rights case such as Brown v. Board of Education or Obergefell v. Hodges would help to raise consciousness.
We were left out of the Civil Rights revolution. Tell people that. Ask the ACLU if sometime it might think of making this an issue.
It is just as wrong to look cross-eyed at someone for being disabled as it is to give someone static for being a person of color.
So far as I know, the public does not know this. It’s time to change that.

Probably, “something that bloggers with writing skills should be able to set about doing” pissed them off.

Well, their trivializing, faux-activism pisses me off.

In the current narrative of “progressives,” people who look funny or move funny (the CPs, Cerebral Palsy, Cleft Palate) offend the Community, and under the rubric of Social Justice, the Community has the right to punish and expel those who offend it, unless they are part of progressivism’s favored classes.

But under Enlightenment liberalism, people who look funny or move funny are still part of The People, and as entitled to The Rights of Man as progressivism’s favored classes: minorities,(1) women, LGBTQ.

Justice Harlan’s Plessy dissent said that the U.S. Constitution "is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens."

The Fourteenth Amendment says everybody is entitled to “the equal protection of the laws.”

Even those the Community considers misfits.

Reciprocity Principle, from the first post on this blog:

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.

/*****/

(1) People having a disability are America’s largest minority, according to the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Department of Labor, and the Centers for Disease Control, among others:

https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/disabilityandhealth/infographic-disability-impacts-all.html
“One in four people in United States has a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control.”
http://www.adainfo.org/sites/default/files/Leadership-Network/Modules-1-5/5a-America-largMinorityFINAL.pdf
“America‘s largest minority”
http://www.dol.gov/odep/pubs/fact/diverse.htm
“As the nation's largest minority — comprising almost 50 million individuals”

An overwhelmed health care system’s triage may discriminate against people with disabilities

The Atlantic states that people with disabilities may face not only “overt discrimination” in hospitals, but “implicit bias” from a prejudice about their quality of life.

As the philosopher Nietzsche remarks below, in times of stress, an eliminationist attitude residing in some of the mainstream rises to the surface.

Elaine Godfrey:

Daniel Florio … was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic disorder that makes him unable to walk or use his arms. His disability makes him more vulnerable to the virus than most people, and he’s afraid of what will happen if he ends up in the hospital with a serious case. Intubated people cannot speak, and Florio would not be able to use gestures or otherwise communicate with his doctors. Given infection-prevention rules, his caregivers would likely not be allowed to accompany him.

She adds:

But Florio is afraid of something else too: the possibility that, if he contracts the virus, he could be denied lifesaving treatment because of his disability. And like other Americans with disabilities, he worries that could happen not just because of overt discrimination in hospitals, but also because of implicit bias. “People overwhelmingly believe that being disabled implies a worse quality of life than it does,” Florio said. If doctors act on those beliefs—wittingly or not—“what that means in practical terms is that people like us will die.”

In some states’ policies it appears that people with disabilities do not have an equal right to life in comparison with the mainstream:

Washington’s guidelines include considerations about a patient’s “baseline functional status,” which involves factors such as physical ability and cognition. … The Washington health department told me it’s updating its guidelines to make sure “its original intent of nondiscrimination” is “unequivocally clear.”

This bears uneasy resemblance to the presuppositions of eugenics advocates, and of proponents of the Will to Power who said that “in a certain state it is indecent to go on living.” The Antichrist declares, “The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so.”

Under the pandemic, a re-evaluation of “disability”

A Facebook post:
Things Covid has proved:

1. The job you were told couldn’t be done remotely can be done remotely 
2. Many disabled workers could have been working from home, but corporations just didn’t want them to 
3. Internet is a utility, not a luxury 
4. Universal healthcare is necessary 
5. Homelessness can be solved when it can affect the rich 
6. Childcare isn’t “doing nothing all day.”
7. Universal Credit is not enough to live on 
8. Wages have nothing to do with skills or value from fruit picker to nurse

Note No. 3

“Thank you for calling me out and giving me this opportunity”

I once went to a local comedy act and the comedian referred to me in front of the audience. I waved him off, feeling very uncomfortable, and the woman with me said, “Don’t be hostile.”

Here’s possibly a better response.

The disabled person could stand up, and say, “I’m glad you called on me, because I’m an advocate for the civil rights of the disabled. We were left out of the civil rights revolution. Hardly anyone thinks we are in a protected class, although we get targeted all the time.

“There’s even a special derogatory catch-phrase for people like me: ‘I don’t care if it harelips the Governor.’ So please remember, we have exactly the same rights as everyone else, even if social events like this don’t act like we do. Sir, thank you for calling me out and giving me this opportunity.”

Was the greatest play of the classical era about a disabled person?

“Nor is that other point to be passed over, that the Sphinx was subdued by a lame man with club feet …” - Sir Francis Bacon, referring to Oedipous (“Swollen Foot”) and the Sphinx.

Oidipous Tyrannos (Oedipus Rex) can reasonably be translated, from Bacon’s perspective, as Clubfoot the Ruler. It then joins such dramas as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Beauty and the Beast, in which a titular character may be expected to wrestle with their disability in the plot.

Disabled people, as we know, are often treated badly. Oidipous’ parents arranged to have him “exposed,” to die.

A disabled Prince so mistreated might, in royal wrath, take gruesome retribution on those who wronged him. In Sophocles’ tragedy, Oidipous kills his father and entangles his mother in incest.

Aristotle’s pioneering work of literary criticism, The Poetics, treats Oidipous as Everyman, arguing that we undergo his extreme experiences vicariously, as “fear and pity.” We return to our everyday lives purged, a “catharsis” in which our spirits are temporarily uplifted out of their dreary banality.

In this disability tale, things are made better; that which was lost is found.

Sadly, two millennia of mainstream lit crit fail to deal with the great moral fact of the play: Oidipous’ parents tried to kill him when he was a helpless baby.

/*****/

A dramatization of this theme, This is the Son of Kings, was published in this blog in 2013.

Two boys with the same disability tried to get help. The rich student got it quickly. The poor student did not.

For many people having disabilities, inaccessibility to necessary services is denial of service. The 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act provides for placement at a private school at public expense if public schools can’t address a learning disability. But obstacles often limit this to wealthy families having above-average resources.

Mike Elsen-Rooney, The Teacher Project: “Two boys with learning disabilities grew up just blocks apart in New York City. Public schools couldn't teach them. So their parents battled to place them in private schools, on the taxpayers' dime.”

For the two dyslexic students below, receiving the revised education they need would enable them to make the contribution to society they were capable of.

For both boys, the struggles at school started in the first grade.
Isaac Rosenthal was a fast talker with a big vocabulary. But when it came time to read, he couldn’t keep up with his classmates. He didn’t pick up on the rhyme scheme in Dr. Seuss books, and often mispronounced words whose meaning he knew (like “Pacific,” for which he’d substitute “the other ocean”).
Landon Rodriguez, four years younger than Isaac, was energetic and talkative at home but quiet and withdrawn at school. When he brought home reading assignments, Landon often confused Bs and Ds, and he labored through even short passages.
By the end of that seminal school year, both of their parents knew that something was wrong. In  second grade, each boy was diagnosed with an unspecified learning disability and started receiving special education services at their public schools. “The teachers had no clue how to teach him,” said Debbie Meyer, Isaac’s mother.
Both families ultimately realized their sons needed support the public schools could not provide, particularly when it came to the all-important task of teaching them to read.

“Who gets private placement? White, wealthy families.”

When Congress passed the landmark Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975, guaranteeing children with learning disabilities a “free and appropriate education” for the first time, it built in the private placement safety net for parents. In some cases, public school officials acknowledge they can’t accommodate a student and agree to pay tuition at a private school. But sometimes families must sue the school district in order to get the tuition covered.

The situation in New York: “Thirty percent of the almost 3,000 students the city recommended for state-approved private schools last year were white, even though white students make up less than 15% of the city’s special education enrollment, state data show.”

Disability forms may not state correctly what qualifies as disability

I have been asked to fill out a “Disability Status Certification” by the 55+ apartment complex where I live. It says “‘Disability’ is defined as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities of an individual, such as not being able to care for oneself, performing manual tasks, walking, seeing, hearing, speaking, breathing, or learning.”

I added, “or a person who is perceived by others as having such impairment.” HUD.gov*

At the bottom of the one-page form I wrote:
(*) “This document stresses access disability. FHA.gov links to HUD.gov, which includes negative perception — stigma/social bias, which is the operative factor in my case.”

Last September, in Your landlord may not realize that the Fair Housing Act applies to such disabilities as cleft palate, the post notes that the person interviewing candidates for the housing complex appeared not to be aware that supervising Federal agencies such as FHA, HUD, ADA, and DOL regard physical conditions which affect appearance as qualifying disabilities.

Policy towards the stigmatized disabled such as those with Cerebral Palsy or Cleft Palate

[This is an unfinished draft of an email to an official of the 55+ apartment complex where I live, concerning disability discrimination that masquerades as normal social interaction. (As discussed previously in TPOCP, the civil rights revolution has not yet happened for disabled people; mainstream society usually turns a blind eye to disability discrimination; and many in the mainstream are often clever at contriving subtle forms of discrimination that appear to be deniable.)]

Manager:

I am a recent new resident of [your 55+ apartment complex] who has a cleft palate. While you were helping me fill out the application forms I answered the question, Are you disabled according to FHA criteria. An FHA website said people impaired in a major life function, one of which was ’speaking,’ are considered disabled, so I checked ‘disabled.’

A related HUD site used criteria similar to those at ADA.GOV, ‘impaired in a major life function, … or perceived as such,’ (emphasis added) thus including the stigma or prejudice of being perceived as disabled or defective (as in ‘birth defect’) among the criteria.

In order to participate in the life of the [apartment complex] community, I participated in a small group which plays Scrabble in the Community Room on Thursdays. Another group, which as I recall plays Pinochle, also uses the CR at the same time. In one of the games after Thanksgiving, I remarked on a couple of Scrabble linguistic peculiarities, something like ‘gript’ for ‘gripped,’ and not allowing other common inflections such as ’ing’ or ‘ed.’ The game finished. Suddenly the person who sets up the board and and puts it away left, saying they would come back after checking their pet, and close up.

Everyone else left, so I stayed, covering for the leader. After waiting quite a while I asked the Pinochle people, who were still playing, if the Scrabble game went on a certain shelf. By this time I was feeling embarrassed. Obviously something unusual had happened, and it focused negative attention on a resident who has a stigmatizing disability.

Before the next scheduled game I realized that it looked like I had been discredited and probably couldn’t continue participating in the game, so I haven’t.

My disability has its own defamatory tag line, ‘I don’t care if it [h-words] the governor.’ If the governor, after a lifetime in the mainstream, improbably woke up one morning with a cleft palate, they would find that repeatedly, what masquerades as normal social action turns out to marginalize, exclude, and disenfranchise them from the social groups that constitute our lives: the family, the classroom, the workplace, and the diversions of retirement.

Online hate against disabled people rising in England

Amy Walker, today, writes:

The charity [Leonard Cheshire, a health and welfare charity] called on global media companies, including Facebook, to take online disability hate crime more seriously and to protect users. It supported recommendations from MPs for government and social media companies to directly consult disabled people on digital strategies and hate crime law.

According to the report, online offenses are increasing, are under-reported, and disabled people are sometimes reluctant to speak out. Those who are targeted do not get social support; and those who discriminate against disabled people suffer no social consequences:

Neil Heslop, the chief executive, said: “Police are increasingly recording online offences, but we know it remains an under-reported area and that disabled people may have reservations about speaking out.

“We suspect many crimes remain under the radar, with survivors never getting support and perpetrators facing no consequences.”

The effect, Heslop said, can cause disabled people to experience stress and isolation. Mocking remarks and hurtful comments demean, degrade, and humiliate people with disabilities, lower their quality of life, and cause them to have “reduced life chances.”

Hate crimes against disabled people could lead to long-term fear, anxiety and isolation.

Janine Howard, who was supported by the charity’s advocacy services after experiencing online abuse, said: “People I don’t know take my photograph when I am out and about, they post it on social media for others to comment on.

“The comments are nasty, hurtful and leave me feeling frightened and angry. There is no escaping this online abuse if I want to use social media.”

A casebook on disability: Facial disfiguration

The first selection notes that in discussions of those whose civil rights are commonly violated, disabled people or often left out.
Jonathan Allen, on the deep divisions exposed by the fight over Rep. Ilhan Omar, in the form of “the list of groups targeted by hatred”: “Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., [noted] that Wiccans, Mormons and disabled people had been left out.” (Emphasis added)

Neil Steinberg, on the human discomfort occasioned by disfigured faces:

Disfigured faces can provoke a fear reaction, leading to bullying and other social tyranny:

Fear of people with facial disfigurements is a common phobia, yet, unlike other fears -- of height, of water, of the dark -- it is seldom discussed, perhaps because so much popular culture, from The Iliad to Saw V, pivots upon this fear. Perhaps it is assumed: of course you are afraid of the man without a face. Who wouldn't be?

Or perhaps because, unlike fear of high places, water or the dark, teratophobia -- fear of disfigured people or of giving birth to a disfigured baby, literally 'fear of monsters' -- has a living object: the injured, burnt, unusual-looking people themselves. Drawing attention to the flinching reaction they often receive, the stares and mockery that are a routine part of their daily lives, can seem an additional cruelty, the sort of vileness enjoyed by schoolyard bullies.

Identifying friend and foe has been a survival skill. A disfigured face, perhaps not seeming human at all, can trigger an instinctive fear:

Why are distorted faces so frightening? Freud classified certain objects as 'unheimlich,' a difficult-to-translate word akin to 'uncanny': strange, weird, unfamiliar. Waxwork dummies, dolls, mannequins can frighten us because we aren't immediately sure what we're looking at, whether it's human or not, and that causes anxiety. A surprisingly large part of the human brain is used to process faces. Identifying friend from foe at a distance was an essential survival skill on the savannah, and a damaged face is thought to somehow rattle this system. ...

The psychologist Irvin Rock demonstrated this in his landmark 1974 paper 'The perception of disoriented figures.' Rock showed that even photos of familiar faces -- famous people like Franklin D Roosevelt, for instance -- will look unsettling when flipped upside down. Just as, if you tip a square enough it stops being a square and starts becoming a diamond, so rotating a face makes it seem less like a face. The mind can't make immediate sense of the inverted features, and reacts with alarm. A bigger change, such as taking away the nose, transforms the face severely enough that it teeters on no longer seeming a human face at all, but something else.

The author himself, who thought he was prepared, experiences “horror”:

That isn't a theoretical example picked out of the air. On another visit to the Craniofacial Center, I enter Seelaus's examination room to be introduced to a patient. He turns in the chair, and is missing the middle part of his face. There are four magnetic posts where his nose will go, and below it, a void revealing smooth yellow plastic. My eyes lock on his eyes, I shake his hand and say some words.

A half-hour later, standing on the elevated train platform, I still feel ... what? 'Harrowed' is the word that eventually comes to mind. Why? There was no surprise. I'm no longer a child but an adult, a newspaper reporter who has spent hours watching autopsies, operations, dissections in gross pathology labs. I was expecting this; it's what I came here for. What about his face was so unsettling?

Maybe seeing injured faces compels an observer to confront the random cruelty of life in a raw form. Maybe it's like peeling back the skin and seeing the skull underneath. Like glimpsing death. Maybe it touches some nameless atavistic horror. ...

Randall H James was born in Ohio in 1956. His first surgeries were done over the next couple of years at Cincinnati Children's Hospital by Dr Jacob Longacre, a pioneer in modern plastic surgery.

The teachers assumed I must be stupid.

Randy James, doctor

Our instincts often betray us into making an “automatic connection between inner person and outer appearance”:  “A disfigured person is a retard”:

"He was like a second father to me because I saw him so much," says James, who didn't celebrate a Christmas at home between the ages of 3 and 13. School holidays were for operations. Summers too.

When little Randy began school, his teachers in the city of Hamilton made a common mistake, the sort of automatic connection between inner person and outer appearance that has been the default assumption since history began.

"The teachers assumed I must be stupid," says James, who was put in a class with children who had learning disabilities -- until teachers realized that he was actually very bright, only shy, and missing an ear, which made it harder for him to hear. He was allowed to sit in the front of the room, where he could hear the teacher, and his grades soared. ...

The disability version of the Heckler's Veto: “You might make the students nervous”:

As a student at the University of Kentucky, James applied to be a residence hall adviser, someone who assists other students in navigating dorm life. The supervisor who rejected him candidly told him that his odd-looking ear could put others off.

"'You might make the students nervous,'" James recalls him saying, then paused, the pain still obvious after 40 years. "These were my classmates."

In the past, disfigured people were often subject to genocide: “A couple hundred years ago, people born with craniofacial conditions, they were just putting them in a bucket of water”:

We are a society where people thrive or fail -- in part, in large part -- because of appearance. The arrangement of your features goes far in deciding who you are attractive to, what jobs you get. Study after study shows that people associate good looks with good qualities, and impugn those who aren't attractive. Even babies do this, favoring large eyes, full lips, smooth skin. Billions of dollars are spent on plastic surgery by people who are in no way disfigured, just for that little extra boost they feel it gives to them, gilding the lilies of their attractiveness.

How do people with unusual appearances fit into such a world? For most of recorded history, children born with disfigurements were wonders, portents or punishments. If they were allowed to live. "A couple hundred years ago, people born with craniofacial conditions, they were just putting them in a bucket of water," said Dr David Reisberg, an oral plastic surgeon at the Craniofacial Center.

“Those that we call monsters are not so to God”:

But even then, astute observers saw beyond externalities. Michel de Montaigne in 1595 encountered a child conjoined to the half-torso, arms and legs of an undeveloped twin (what we would now call a parasitic twin), displayed by its father for money. Montaigne noted: "Those that we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of His work the infinite forms that He has comprehended therein."

“With malice toward none, with charity for all,” said our kindest president.

Dwarf “Tossing”: Is it the business of the law to protect the dignity of the stigmatized?

Two days ago, National Review writer Katherine Timpf wrote:

A Washington state lawmaker has proposed legislation that would outlaw dwarf tossing, claiming that “it ridicules and demeans people with dwarfism.”
Dwarf tossing, by the way, is when a person with dwarfism volunteers to have someone throw him or her against a padded surface or Velcro wall, usually while wearing protective gear. Let me be clear: No one is forcing these dwarves to be thrown anywhere. Participation is completely and totally voluntary, and the dwarves who choose to participate are even usually paid for their performances, but the lawmaker — Republican state senator Mike Padden — wants to take this option to make a little extra cash away from them. ...
“There’s nothing funny about dwarf-tossing,” Padden said in a statement. “It ridicules and demeans people with dwarfism, and causes others to think of them as objects of public amusement.”

Timpf added, “I know that the aim of this bill is supposed to be to help dwarves, but I think it’s actually kind of offensive to them, if anything. After all, saying that such a bill would be necessary is basically suggesting that dwarves are not capable of making the decision about whether or not to participate in these sorts of activities for themselves. It’s also taking away from dwarves the opportunity to make a little extra cash — an opportunity that some dwarves might really want to take advantage of.”

In Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer reports that the judge nominated to fill the vacancy left by Kavanaugh's ascension to the Supreme Court finds solicitude for the dignity of the disabled coercive:

Neomi Rao, Trump’s nominee to replace Brett Kavanaugh on the powerful DC Circuit, ... has written at least two law review articles and a blog post in which she defended dwarf-tossing. ...
[In parts of France]  a judge upheld such bans because of “considerations of human dignity.” Rao considers these laws an affront to individual liberty that fails to recognize the right of the dwarf to be tossed. In one article, she wrote that the decision in France upholding the dwarf-tossing ban was an example of “dignity as coercion” and that it “demonstrates how concepts of dignity can be used to coerce individuals by forcing upon them a particular understanding of dignity.”

There are real-world consequences. John Sainsbury, in 2012:

In an incident that recently came to light, Martin Henderson, a 37-year-old British dwarf, was out celebrating his birthday when he was suddenly picked up and thrown by a "hooded thug" while trying to enjoy a cigarette outside a pub in Wincanton, Somerset. He is now confined for much of the time to a wheelchair. Police believe the perpetrator was inspired by reports about the alleged antics of [recreational dwarf tossers.]

Sainsbury continues, "There are issues of human dignity involved as well. If you toss one dwarf as if he were a mere object, doesn't that degrade the entire dwarf community?"

Civil rights is the protection of the autonomy and dignity of everyone, even the powerless. The contrary of dignity is humiliation, and the humiliation of the disabled is a familiar form of attempting to degrade, demean, and marginalize those who are different.

Social deprivation of dignity is often the first step in eroding the civil rights of the disabled. “You’re ridiculous, so don’t expect to be treated as if you aren’t.” Humiliation, the process of contriving to rob disabled people of ordinary human dignity, is social murder. Forever after, wherever the humiliation is known about, the victim attempts to participate in society under the burden of a spoiled identity, subject to the slights and slurs and open contempt of those who one once thought were friends.

The values of the left often discriminate against the stigmatized disabled

The politics of identity [POI] is the politics of approved identities, primarily "minorities," women, LGBTQ people, and subcultures at the present time.(1) But the nation's largest minority, the disabled, have a socially "spoiled identity," as Erving Goffman wrote.

Under the liberal principle that all people are created equal, this is a problem. Egalitarianism would not allow approved identities and disapproved identities. This is clearly not equality. To tag anyone as having a disapproved identity because of the group they were born into would be prejudicial discrimination under the principles of liberalism.

Theoretically, the politics of identity is about identities which produce targeting. "Minorities," women, LGBTQ people, and subcultures, are the identities progressives valorize because these groups have historically been the victims of racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia. A disabled person of whatever race, gender, or class is targeted because disability stigma is spoiled identity. Because the disabled also have historically been targeted, the politics of identity would be expected to work to the advantage of people with disabilities as well.

That's not what actually happens. More typically, when members of the left see a white male (for example) who is one of the CPs (stigmatized by Cerebral Palsy or Cleft Palate), they remember that white males should be punished for racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia. Here's an example:

At a party I, a white male CP attended, an East Asian community college teacher started asking intrusive questions when she discovered I wasn't a community college teacher like most of the people there. She persisted even when it was clear that I was uncomfortable with what seemed to be an insinuation that I didn't belong there. When she managed to work in a reference to someone she knew who was also--her exact words--"funny looking," the two guests to my left were visibly shocked.

I was shocked for a different reason. None of the teachers and instructors there expressed social disapproval at seeing a person with a birth defect demeaned and degraded by a colleague. What they saw was what they considered a "minority" giving a member of an oppressor group what he deserved.

This is an example of the way the left concept of justice for "minority" identities can produce a miscarriage of justice in the case of disability.

Another very touchy problem is that members of other cultures and ethnicities can be even more inclined to discriminate against disabled people than the American mainstream. From a disability blog:

"Al in Texas": I am not being critical of our growing foreign population, but the views regarding people with disabilities outside the USA can be harsh and I am seeing more of that pop up in my daily life than I ever have.

As one of the CPs, I sometimes hear someone mutter, "pendejo," as I make my way down the aisle of a crowded bus.

Writer James Fallows observed this in China:

The real story here is about the situation of dwarves in China. Airen, 矮人, or small people. When we lived in Shanghai a few years ago, I happened to be walking behind a dwarf, on a lane near where we lived. Everyone coming our way slowed down to point and laugh at him. Later many people explained to me that laughing is the behavior of embarrassment, and that the Chinese were uncomfortable and embarrassed at seeing someone who looked unusual and so different from the norm.

And the treatment I experienced at the hands of an East Asian community college teacher, above, may be an illustration of the "harsh" effect that some immigrants and refugees can have on America's largest minority.We all welcome the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free to this great land, but as "Al in Texas" observed, that does not excuse prejudicial "views regarding people with disabilities."

Here again, the values of the left exacerbate the problem. "Minorities," women, LGBTQ people, and subcultures are valorized; funny looking awkward people who offend us by making us feel uncomfortable do not have the support of the community. And democracy, says these values, is the will of the community.

(1) The Politics of Identity tends to produce ad hominem argument. Here Andrew Sullivan's observation concerning campus left values may be apropos:

Unashamed resort to ad hominem fallacy on campus now: "The idea that only a member of a minority group can speak about racism or homophobia, or that only women can discuss sexual harassment. The only reason this should be the case is if we think someone’s identity is more important than the argument they might want to make."

“Our impairments aren't what disable us ... society does that.”

A person with a cleft palate (PWACP) reports that at the college they attended there four people with cleft palate. Only the one with facial characteristics of cleft palate was treated as disabled.
Margo Victoria Bok and others in the BC Disability Caucus Facebook page:

“Government needs to act on making educational environments far more supportive for those in both k to 12 and post secondary A big part of that needs to be insisting that organizations address the prejudice and discrimination that is far too commonplace. People need to learn that we aren't less able than the nondisabled. Our impairments aren't what disable us ... society does that.”

“Yes, very true. I like the way she put it because the disabled are so seriously marginalized. Prejudices about us are accepted as truth by so many. So, it's especially tough for the disabled to find environments that are inclusive, supportive and accepting.”

Martha Nussbaum in Reason 2004:

On the other side, our society also has been thinking a lot about how to protect citizens from shame. One can see this in particular in recent public debates about citizens with disabilities, where much attention is given to how both employment and education can be non-stigmatizing. One of my questions is whether it is coherent to favor a restoration of shaming in criminal punishment, while seeking to protect all citizens from shame. I hold that there is no surface inconsistency in such a position, but that there is a deeper inconsistency, because an interest in shame in punishment is ultimately inconsistent with respect for the equal dignity of all citizens. (Emphasis added)

As one PWACP says, we aren't anti-social. Society is anti-us.

We need a new narrative. "Prejudices about us are accepted as truth by so many." A common experience can occur when we attend a party. Someone starts asking supposedly friendly questions, but the subtext is negative. They are rhetorical questions. People start edging away, but nobody in the social group objects, even though it is clear that the one person present who is different is being put on the hot seat. "Prejudice and discrimination ... is far too commonplace." The subtext is, "what's a misfit doing at a party?" It's a double standard. The mainstream wouldn't stand by and do nothing if a derogatory environment was being created for a racial minority.

The reciprocity principle expressed in the first post in this blog:

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. - Introduction: Social Attitudes and the Disability Cohort

Sometimes Disability Discrimination is Extreme

Four years ago The New York Times reported:

In January, the actor Peter Dinklage surprised himself during his own Golden Globe acceptance speech. Dinklage had won the award for best supporting actor in a TV series for his portrayal of the complex, sharp-tongued Tyrion Lannister, who’s the closest thing to a hero in HBO’s epic swords-and-sex hit “Game of Thrones,” which returns for its second season on April 1. As he took the statue from the presenter, Piper Perabo, the onstage microphone stand quietly lowered into the floor to accommodate the 4-foot-5 actor.

Dinklage thanked the people he needed to thank — the author George R. R. Martin, who wrote the novels on which “Game of Thrones” is based; his mother in New Jersey; the cast and crew. As the wrap-it-up music began to swell, Dinklage thought about what his wife had been telling him all night at their table: “Let people know. It isn’t right.” He hesitated a moment, then thought, I’m just gonna do it. “I want to mention a gentleman I’ve been thinking about, in England,” he said quickly. “His name is Martin Henderson. Google him.”

What was Martin Henderson's story? The Telegraph reports:

Martin Henderson - celebrating his 37th birthday with friends - was thrown into the air by a hooded thug in a copycat of the shamed England rugby star Mike Tindall's behaviour in the summer.

Tindall was kicked out of the Elite Player Squad squad and fined £25,000 after a Rugby Football Union investigation into his drunken night in a dwarf-themed Queenstown bar.

In the copycat incident a month later, Mr Henderson suffered damage to nerve tissue in his spine causing his legs to go numb after landing on his back on the pavement.

Officers have now launched an investigation into the incident.

Mr Henderson condemned the hooded stranger yesterday (Thurs) after the cruel prank left him confined to a wheelchair.

He said: "From what I remember, there was only one person involved but it was very scary as I didn't know what was going on.
"I guess I was an easy target and the only reason I was picked on was because I am small.
"People's attitudes to me when I go out can be pretty cruel. Most are OK but you get the odd idiot who will make fun and start laughing at me.
"You just have to ignore it but this is the first time I have been picked up and thrown about."
Mr Henderson, who has dwarfism, was celebrating his birthday at the White Horse pub in Wincanton, Somerset, on October 7 when the prankster struck.
It came one month after England rugby players were caught 'dwarf throwing' at a bar during a drunken night out.

Boys will be boys, won't they?

Dwarfaware:

I have a son who is funny, adorable, smart and just happens to be a Little Person. He was born with Achondroplasia; it is the leading cause of dwarfism. Thanks to many hard-working and talented people, the public at large has become more familiar with persons of short stature. Still, there are many misconceptions, misunderstandings and questions that average stature people have. I’d like to answer some of them.

• Around 80% of babies born with dwarfism come from average stature parents.
• They are of the same intelligence as the more general public.
• They are surgeons, lawyers, teachers, athletes, artists, journalists, and almost every other profession you can think of.
• The unemployment rate is higher than any other able-bodied group of people.
• The “M” word, or “midget”, is offensive to most little people. It does not refer to any one type of dwarfism. It is just a bad word.
• My son has a disproportionate type of dwarfism, that means his upper arms and legs, for instance, are shorter than average. He is perfectly proportioned for who he is, but is not the same, proportion-wise as taller folks.
• Persons with Achondroplasia, (Achons), compare equally in intelligence, talent, and ability to get the job done.
• Achons have medical issues, but rarely ask for assistance. They do have the same life expectancy as anyone else.

Those are the some of the facts.

Here are some myths:

• Little people love poking fun at how they appear to others.
• Little people only date other little people.
• They must agree with being called a midget or treated as one because they are always on t.v. dressed up as funny characters.
• Dwarfs cannot handle themselves in the workplace; they scare clients away and are always absent. They need too much special equipment.

The Telegraph article continues:

Mr Henderson has also suffered a broken wrist since the attack after he fell over when his legs gave way.
A spokesman from Avon and Somerset Police said: "Officers investigating would like to speak to anyone who may have been in the pub on the night of October 7.
"It follows an incident in which a small person was picked up by an unknown person in the bar and dropped."
The man was described as being of a slim build, dark hair, around 5 ft 8 inches tall and wearing a hooded top and baseball cap.

From our blog post of July 6, 2014:

In Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote:

The dwarf, the disfigured, the blind man, the homosexual, the ex-mental patient and the member of a racial or religious minority all share one characteristic: they are all socially "abnormal", and therefore in danger of being considered less than human. Whether ordinary people react by rejection, by over-hearty acceptance or by plain embarrassment, their main concern is with such an individual's deviance, not with the whole of his personality. "Stigma" is a study of situations where normal and abnormal meet, and of the ways in which a stigmatized person can develop a more positive social and personal identity. (Emphasis added)

An entry by Deborah Fallows in James Fallows' column three years ago illustrates this:

The real story here is about the situation of dwarves in China. Airen, 矮人, or small people. When we lived in Shanghai a few years ago, I happened to be walking behind a dwarf, on a lane near where we lived. Everyone coming our way slowed down to point and laugh at him. Later many people explained to me that laughing is the behavior of embarrassment, and that the Chinese were uncomfortable and embarrassed at seeing someone who looked unusual and so different from the norm. (Emphasis added)

The rules of behavior in middle class America tend to prevent such openly discriminatory behavior on the street. But as many of the previous posts on this weblog demonstrate, disability discrimination—a violation of our own professed values—is prevalent throughout our society. 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.”

Our society is becoming more identity-conscious, not less; to the detriment of universal justice. Identity-on-the-right characterizes the current presidential campaign of Donald Trump, who makes political hay out of prejudice against Muslim, Mexican, female, and disabled identities.

Last August, it was reported that the illiberal campus left imposed self-censorship rules on students deemed to have spoken in the wrong way about selected identities:

Multiple professors at Washington State University have explicitly told students their grades will suffer if they use terms such as “illegal alien,” "male," and “female,” or if they fail to “defer” to non-white students.

According to the syllabus for Selena Lester Breikss’ “Women & Popular Culture” class, students risk a failing grade if they use any common descriptors that Breikss considers “oppressive and hateful language.”

"Students will come to recognize how white privilege functions in everyday social structures and institutions.”

The punishment for repeatedly using the banned words, Breikss warns, includes “but [is] not limited to removal from the class without attendance or participation points, failure of the assignment, and— in extreme cases— failure for the semester.”

Breikss is not the only WSU faculty member implementing such policies.

Much like in Selena Breikss’s classroom, students taking Professor Rebecca Fowler’s “Introduction to Comparative Ethnic Studies” course will see their grades suffer if they use the term “illegal alien” in their assigned writing.

According to her syllabus, students will lose one point every time they use the words “illegal alien” or “illegals” rather than the preferred terms of “‘undocumented’ migrants/immigrants/persons.” Throughout the course, Fowler says, students will “come to recognize how white privilege functions in everyday social structures and institutions.”

For disabled people the problem with this is that neither right identity politics nor left identity politics is concerned with impartial justice. Universal justice protects everybody from civil rights violations: it is about what, not who. Martin Henderson was permanently injured, and the dwarf in China subject to open public mockery, because disability stigma is a "spoiled identity" in a world which valorizes or punishes based on identity rather than a sense of justice.

As Martin Luther King said, "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

The Stigmatized Disabled and Medical Discrimination

Among the conditions which the medical profession treats are the various disabilities. The lay public sometimes makes moral judgments or otherwise discriminates against such medical conditions (see a previous article's mention of cerebral palsy), but health care professionals should be above such prejudices.

In reality, disabled people need to realize that disability discrimination in medical care often happens, and that the disabled need to take measures to prevent this from impacting the care they receive.

Mention of the problem is readily found online: A Wikipedia entry notes:

The disabled remain at a disadvantage with respect to health and health care.

An article last September in The New England Journal of Medicine by Georgina Peacock, M.D., M.P.H., Lisa I. Iezzoni, M.D., and Thomas R. Harkin, J.D. observes:

Many factors may contribute to these disparities, including physical barriers to care (e.g., inaccessible medical diagnostic equipment such as examination tables, weight scales, and imaging technologies); noninclusive health or wellness programs designed for people without disabilities; transportation problems, especially in areas with poor public transportation; inaccurate or inadequate knowledge or stigmatizing attitudes of clinicians about disabling conditions; competing priorities in the health care system; prior difficult or unpleasant experiences getting health care; and communication barriers, such as failure to accommodate deaf patients who require sign-language interpreters.  (Emphasis added)

A Disability Rights Washington staff bio includes:

[David Carlson] was ... awarded the TASC Excellence in Advocacy Award from the National Disability Rights Network. This in response to the first of two reports addressing discriminatory practices of medical professionals against people with disability, for which he was the lead author. (Emphasis added)

When the disabled go to the doctor they need to

• Select their personal physician carefully. Some are equitable and professional. Others may condescend, talk down, assume the patient should be humble and apologetic, expect the patient not to question the doctor's decision, treat the patient as mentally limited or uncooperative, or assume the patient is an ideal candidate for experimental procedures.
• If necessary, include a friend or family member in contacts with medical staff, so that they understand they are not dealing solely with a person they may consider to be at a disadvantage.
• Make sure no medical treatment is undertaken without informed consent. (What are the alternatives to the proposed treatment? What outcome can be expected in each case, and what are the tradeoffs?)
• Be willing to ask for a second opinion.
• Ask for complete information after a procedure has been completed. (What did the physician encounter when s/he began the procedure? How well did it go? What can the patient expect during the recovery period? What medications or self-care procedures will the patient be responsible for? How long will these be in effect?)
• Expect to be treated with consideration and respect. Contact the facility's patient relations staff (whatever the facility calls them) if necessary.
• Contact disability rights resources in your community or state if necessary.

The "stigmatizing attitudes of clinicians about disabling conditions" and the "discriminatory practices of medical professionals against people with disability" have been publicly documented in the above cites, which also note that the disabled often have "prior difficult or unpleasant experiences getting health care." This is the reality of being disabled in our society, and you who are disabled need to be prepared.

-*--

A previous post, What Others are Saying, contains links to Independence Chick's blog and other online resources for dealing with disability discrimination.

A Writer on Living with Depression

It boiled down to this: I decided that my life, as I had known it, was over. I was never going to get back to the job I had when I was 25 years old, making $65,000. I was never going to get married and father children. It was time to put a fork in those dreams—I couldn't reclaim them. That me was dead and done, and I was reconciled to that. - Philip Dawdy, on his mental illness

A decade back, Philip Dawdy wrote an article for the Seattle Weekly about Rodney Plamondon's mental illness, and his own.

We post portions of his article in case they may provide perspective for people with disabilities related to his. Note that Dawdy finally resorted to a solution which went against much of the medical advice for people with his condition. While he claims that this worked for him, what he did was risky, and may well be the wrong approach for most others in a similar situation.

Dawdy begins:

He was in the hospital the day he learned he had been elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Rodney Plamondon looked for a while at the letter that told him this. He was pleased. He was the 22-year-old son of a long-haul truck driver. Rodney's future wouldn't involve driving a Kenworth.

This was good. He had dreams. He had aspirations of doing graduate work in the classics at an Ivy League school, of teaching after that. Or entering the Foreign Service. Getting into that honorary society wouldn't hurt his chances at either.

Rodney put the letter away. He had more pressing concerns.

He was, on this July 1984 day, in the psychiatric unit of a hospital in Boise, Idaho, his hometown. He was newly diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Rodney hadn't the slightest idea what this diagnosis meant for his world, but he knew that his life had changed dramatically.

Dawdy goes on to describe the effects of orthodox [drug] treatment on Rodney:

Rodney is still staring at the dark walls of the tunnel. In the past year, he's been in and out of psych units in Seattle eight times. He's lost pretty much everything—his furniture, his computer, his cat, and every scrap of fiction and poetry he had written over the past 20 years. He takes Haldol and Clozaril twice a day—powerful antipsychotics. Rodney sleeps 12 hours a day on average, sometimes 15. On his left cheek, there are flakes of skin where the pillowcase has rubbed him.

Some days, when he leaves the building, he looks as though he's been mugged and beaten. Those are his good days. Other times, the bad days, he's too paranoid to step outside.

"It happened to me that way, too," Dawdy wrote,

a psychotic break out of the blue during a twentysomething life that had been shaping up quite nicely. It was difficult to build a new life out of that. There were many, many setbacks. That's the absurd deal of mental illness: You get taken most commonly in your youth, when life is just beginning to gel. You get an illness that, in many cases, is so disabling that it strips you of the psychological and practical goods essential to a decent existence. Often you get kicked right out of the mainstream, no matter how solid a citizen you were before it all went bad.

What are you going to do about that?

You have three choices: kill yourself, lead a featureless existence, or fight back and extract some measure of revenge on that which laid you low. Rodney and I rejected options one and two. Option three is no cakewalk. It takes years of determined effort before you see light at the end of the tunnel, and as you feel your way along, you've got to do it all on blind faith that something good might happen. After 15 years, I'm finally beginning to see a faint glow.

Dawdy describes his eventual realization dramatically:

You will stay awake at night and gnaw on that problem, probably for years. You'll likely struggle with some level of suicidal tendency. You're broke, mentally, physically, and financially. Some in your family and circle of friends have cut off contact. Rodney hears from his father perhaps once a year, usually by letter (his mother died in 1987). You wind up hating yourself because these consequences seem thoroughly logical.

What makes things dicey is that what you've got is episodic. You can take your meds and keep appointments with every doctor and social worker under the sun and yet, nine months later, bam, here comes another round of mania. Hello, locked psych unit. Goodbye, job and apartment. Stabilize. Repeat.

I was beset by the same cycles during my 20s and 30s. Meds followed meds, 16 in all. Breakdowns followed breakdowns. Nothing seemed to work for very long. I lost jobs at a healthy clip.

Amidst this whirl of disorder, I learned three crucial things. One, I wasn't going to kill myself. Second, I had far more power over my fate than any doctor ever let on. Third, the existentialists weren't joking: The world is truly absurd.

I'd like to claim that one night I was visited with a revelation about how to grapple with this. It was a far lengthier process.

It boiled down to this: I decided that my life, as I had known it, was over. I was never going to get back to the job I had when I was 25 years old, making $65,000. I was never going to get married and father children. It was time to put a fork in those dreams—I couldn't reclaim them. That me was dead and done, and I was reconciled to that.

That kind of truth will set you free. It will free you to take the kind of risks you'd never take if you were trying to realign yourself with the life you once lived and the goals that once got you out of bed each morning.

Also, it freed me to be pushier with my doctors about what meds and how many of them I would take. I couldn't, for example, tolerate the amount of sleeping caused by antidepressants. My doctor reacted as if no patient had ever bossed him around before.

Dawdy's decision was to endure bouts of depression instead of taking antidepressants at the recommended level. "I can't approve of this, of course," his doctor said.

Here's what he lives with:

When I get my semiannual visits of depression, I can't leave my apartment for days at a time. I can't listen to music of any kind. It all becomes grating and metallic—not even Mozart can punch through that mental pea soup.

Dawdy reflects on our society's treatment of the mentally ill:

As a country, we've spent the past 40 years trying to figure out what to do with people like Rodney, for our sake as well as theirs.

In the 1960s, he'd have been confined at a state mental hospital. That isn't too humane and costs a fortune, so we've mostly backed off that reflexive reaction to the chronically mentally ill. By the mid-1980s, people like Rodney were being pushed onto the streets. We tried to de-institutionalize them on the cheap and failed to provide housing. Oops.

But soon after, all the Prozacs and Risperdals came onto the market. They were a better deal than restraints in a state hospital or the old psych meds like Thorazine or the hazards of the streets.

And that was that, we figured. The meds are a cure, and we're saving money by not hospitalizing these folks. Let them live among the rest of us and go to work in the morning and pay bills in the evening. Let's get as many of them as we can off the public dime.

So what's next for someone like Rodney, assuming he's reasonably lucky and stabilizes? The way things are now, probably not much.

Are you going to hire him? He's barely worked in the past five years, and frankly, the man is too smart to find much satisfaction in pushing a broom in an office building. Will your family take him in? His own family has spent the past 20 years spurning him. Want to marry him?

You know the answers.

I once worked with a nice guy who had Tourette's Syndrome. I was sitting in the break room with him when he suddenly said, "Hey [n-word] fat [n-word]." "Huh?" I said. He looked at me in surprise. Touretters are often unaware of their involuntary outbursts.

I ran into him in a Toys'R'Us years later. It was explained to the other customers that he wasn't in control of what he said. Many of them refused to accept this. They thought it was just an excuse to get away with unacceptable conduct.

What would it be like to have your id broadcasting to the world without your control?

Philip Dawdy's solution to his mental illness, if it actually was as he describes, is anecdotal. He does not, for instance, seem to imply that it would work for Rodney.

But public understanding and acceptance toward the afflicted can make life workable for many. The customers who took a moralistic approach to the guy with Tourette's weren't making anything better for anyone.

Access Has Been Improved; Social Attitudes Lag Behind

In A Recent Book on the Civil Rights of the Disabled, the "recent book," What We Have Done, documented the creation of the Americans With Disabilities Act as a nationwide campaign for better access for people with mobility problems and other physical disabilities. That is one of the nation's great achievements. The United States has become one of the most advanced nations in, for example, providing wheelchair access in architecture and transportation.

Yet stigma and social discrimination still keep millions of disabled people on the margins. For example, previous posts have discussed news articles on the discrimination against people with cerebral palsy here, here, here, and here, among others. The pervasive discrimination against people with cleft palate is discussed in many posts.

Randy Rutta observes that as the 25th anniversary of the ADA approaches, disabled people still suffer from significantly higher unemployment rates compared to the rest of the population:

The unacceptable unemployment situation for adults with disabilities is a troubling irony as the nation prepares to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The landmark civil rights legislation, signed into law by President George H.W. Bush on July 26, 1990, outlawed discrimination on the basis of disability.

He describes the areas in which the disabled were marginalized and disenfranchised at the time of the law's enactment:

The text of the law laid bare the hurdles that people with disabilities faced at the time. "Discrimination against individuals with disabilities persists in such critical areas as employment, housing, public accommodations, education, transportation, communication, recreation, institutionalization, health services, voting, and access to public services," the law said.

The ADA established the nation's goals for individuals with disabilities "to assure equality of opportunity, full participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency for such individuals."

And Rutta notes that not just access, but "discrimination and prejudice" present barriers to equality for the disabled:

The law affirmed that discrimination and prejudice denies people with disabilities the opportunity to compete. But it also recognized the huge societal downside of keeping people with disabilities on the margins — workplace discrimination costs the country billions of dollars resulting from dependency and nonproductivity.

It is significant that in What We Have Done there are dozens of examples of ways in which the ADA has improved physical access, but the book does not mention people with cleft palate, whose primary problem is discriminatory social attitudes, not access.