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)

A preliminary note on the particular characteristics of the cleft palate disability

The author of the IndependenceChick blog refers to the mainstream as temporarily abled. Doesn’t really fit those who have a cleft. Personal example: I’m a high school and college letterman in the distance events (admittedly in small schools); climbed Mt. Hood a couple times (requires crampons and ice axe); ran marathons.

The nub of the story could be detected in the situation at the undergraduate school I attended. The three other clefted people there did not have a cleft lip. They could pass. They were not treated as disabled.

Our disability consists in the pervasive social attitude of those who can see us. Our disability is social.

It would help if the civil rights revolution was popularly understood as including us. It would help if we were popularly understood as being in a protected class, since the formal mechanisms of “civil rights” unfortunately leverage identity.(1)

Another topic, as things are, and particularly in the holiday season, gift-giving-and-the-outsider seems to be an undiscussed aspect of cleft prejudice. The person we give a gift to uneasily feels that we are presuming that we are their equal in doing so. But not giving the gift violates a social norm. It’s a cleft Catch-22. The existing social system’s neglect of people having a cleft here, as in many places, lacks:

1. A social standard for required social gift-giving
2. A social language or mode of discourse for us is missing. If the issue is race, one can say “racist,” “racism.” The proposed equivalent, “ableist,” “ableism” is feeble. (Would “cleftphobic” serve as “transphobic” does?)
3. In any case, we’re not supposed to talk about it. (I remember the feeling of struggling against a taboo when starting this blog years ago.)
4. The last post observed that cleft people can’t use the communitarian solution because their 1-in-700 status effectively means that the average cleft person doesn’t have a community
5. Political action is hindered by the same factor: 1-in-700
6. Democratic public-spiritedness should help the clefted population, but again as the last post implies, this is now much more the era of power, not ethics/civic virtue

A personal experience with institutions, which may be more than anecdotal: In the fall of the year I graduated from college, I entered a midwestern university English Department’s Ph.D program, having a national scholastic fellowship. At the department’s welcoming party, when the department’s representative saw me, he got a look of unbelieving disgust. In the classes, it was clear that I was not welcome.

At a left coast university, in encounters as a graduate student (I entered on an M.A. from a city university just starting its graduate program), as an auditor, and in an adult education class, an attitude having nothing to do with scholastic ability prevailed.

My impression, which you may not agree with, is that where the stigmatized disabled are concerned, some public higher education institutions care more about their impression than about their education responsibilities to their students.

Concluding notes: A google search on “cleft palate” still

1. Produces entries about us, not by us
2. Helps the parents of children having a cleft (who certainly need it) by providing corrective surgery and other needed services during the growing years but
3. Does not discover entries:
4. By us
5. About local, state, or federal programs or funds after age 18, to deal with widespread discriminatory attitudes and practices; severe isolation and unavailability of social contact and community; lack of political influence; and concealed exclusion from institutions which fear they will be tarnished by association with someone who has a cleft

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(1) The Founding, in beginning the Preamble with “We the People,” implied that identity was not supposed to matter. In the same spirit, Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy: The Constitution knows nothing of class and regards man as man where his civil rights under the Constitution are concerned (quoted from memory) prefigured MLK’s own anti-identitarian content-of-their-character, not color-of-their-skin formula.

Unfortunately, since the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause seems to be currently instituted as protected class, it would really help if the American public came to believe we are in a protected class.

Cancel culture and the pervasive social discrimination against the stigmatized disable.

This is the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. The America of that time, up until around 1980, had characteristics that were more friendly to those who are different. Those who opposed McCarthyism during the Eisenhower administration, for example, supported the individualism of the right to march to the sound of a different drummer. The same respect for the right to be different made them oppose “guilt by association.” They opposed groupthink, which is now valorized as “solidarity.” They opposed “end justifies the means” rationalization in the name of principled argument, representing individual values rather than group aggrandizement. The chief characteristic of the America of the Great Generation was friendship. The chief characteristic of what America has become is enmity.

This is particularly disastrous for people who are thought to “offend” because of birth defects.

Sociologist Erving Goffman noted that disabled and other stigmatized people have a “spoiled identity.” 

Christophe Van Eecke on “Cancel Culture and the Logic of Torture” in Quillette: “Nevertheless, a very similar effect is obtained by destroying the victim’s social world. This explains why it is important  for shaming and cancellation to be public events—they are meant to isolate the accused from the community. This isolation is experienced as physical as much as spiritual. The destruction of the world that is achieved in torture by the destruction of the body and its relationship to its immediate physical surroundings is achieved in cancel culture by the infliction of an abject state of loneliness, which equally cuts the victim off from the world.” (Emphasis added)

Unlike other targeted minorities, the clefted, being a minuscule population (1 in 700), and having no governmental or other societal programs once they become adults, do not have a community. We can be, as previous posts have noted, attacked on the grounds of “What’s a misfit doing at a party?” without fear that anyone will come to our support.

Van Eecke continues: “This experience has been most eloquently described by Hannah Arendt in her analysis of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt argues that inducing a state of loneliness in people has the effect of destroying all sense of community, reducing individuals to isolated atoms, and thereby preparing them, through abject fear, for totalitarian rule. As Arendt explains, “Totalitarian domination … bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.” As Arendt points out, “Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others.” A lonely man “finds himself surrounded by others with whom he cannot establish contact or to whose hostility he is exposed … In solitude, in other words, I am 'by myself,' … whereas in loneliness I am actually one, deserted by all others.” Solitude can be enjoyed—it is often even a luxury—whereas loneliness is terror.” (Emphasis added)

The disabled “finds himself surrounded by others with whom he cannot establish contact or to whose hostility he is exposed … In solitude, in other words, I am 'by myself,' … whereas in loneliness I am actually one, deserted by all others.”

Van Eecke: “The function of public shaming and cancellation is to inflict loneliness—it cuts the victim off from the family of man. It makes him an abject untouchable and has as its only aim his total removal from society. This is achieved by publicizing the cancellation, which ensures that this person will lose his job, his livelihood, his social circle, and will almost certainly not find another job in the foreseeable future. In close analogy to physical torture, where everyday objects (a chair, the food one eats) and even the body itself are turned into hostile weapons, the shared world is turned into a hostile environment for the publicly shamed person, who is now shunned by everyone. The very people who were only recently friends and colleagues are now the weapons that inflict pain through their absence, confirming the victim’s isolation.”

We know that sooner or later you will be humiliated. “The function of public shaming and cancellation is to inflict loneliness—it cuts the victim off from the family of man. It makes him an abject untouchable and has as its only aim his total removal from society. This is achieved by publicizing the cancellation, … ”

Van Eecke: “In this way, the security a person feels within the human community is destroyed and the world is made hostile. It effectively reduces the limits of one’s being to the limits of the body. Any person who has ever suffered severe public shame will acknowledge that the limits of one’s body are a thin shell between oneself and a hostile environment.”

Sooner or later you will be humiliated. Suffer “severe public shame … ”

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The language of the new regrettable enmity society, and its cancel culture, map a great increase in the already discriminatory tendency of the mainstream toward those born having a birth defect.

Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity - The Scarlet Letter of the CPs: “You’re Guilty”

Yours truly is fortunate that his formative era was the Truman - Eisenhower - Kennedy years. At the time of its Army-McCarthy row, the left rejected:

• End justifies the means rationalization
• Groupthink
• Extrajudicial determination of guilt
• Guilt by association
• Conformism

Nearly a decade ago Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom proclaimed a “mission to civilize” in the face of social tendencies which make us “meaner and less civilized.” In an episode highly criticized by the left media, Thomas Sadoski’s character Don Keefer prevents the airing, by a student who has been raped, of a precursor of the Shitty Media Men phenomenon. Shitty Media Men was an online spreadsheet which allowed  public rape accusation without due process. A writer who objected was “excused from the room” by Sorkin. Sorkin/Keefer took the position that this sort of extrajudicial determination of guilt without due process could damage the reputations of innocent people.

This new righteous attack culture in the name of social justice makes this era worse for people having a spoiled identity because of birth defect stigma. Sorkin was socially punished for predicting that anonymous accusation having the ostensible purpose of countering rape could derail innocent people’s lives.(1) This same new climate of punishment, which rejects the law’s sacred presumption of innocence, means American culture has gotten worse for disabled people, particularly if they have stigmatizing afflictions. (“You’re guilty!” a City of Seattle co-worker once greeted me, apropos of nothing whatever.)

The new, righteous social justice presumption of guilt actually has an ancient pedigree. John 9:2 “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born thus?”

A current The Atlantic article by Anne Applebaum says we have entered a new Scarlet Letter era. “The scarlet letter has “the effect of a spell, taking her [Hester Prynne] out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.”” (Emphasis added)

“We live in a land governed by the rule of law,” she adds, “we have procedures designed to prevent the meting-out of unfair punishment. Scarlet letters are a thing of the past.

Except, of course, they aren’t. Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago. Some have made egregious errors of judgment. Some have done nothing at all. It is not always easy to tell.”

And some Cerebral Palsy people, some Cleft Palate people, and others who look different, are “out of the ordinary relations with humanity” in an unrecognized shadow world. Where it is impossible to live a normal life. The Scarlet Letter of disability stigma means they lose everything — “jobs, money, friends, colleagues” — after violating no laws … 

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(1) Stephen Elliott: “How an Anonymous Accusation Derailed my Life”

“The Paris Review decided not to run an interview they had already completed with me for their web site. I was disinvited from several events, including a panel at the Los Angeles Festival of Books. Someone even called a bookstore in New York where I was scheduled to do a reading and urged them to cancel their event. …

Then my television agent stopped returning my calls. Was this just business as usual, or had she found out about the list? I didn’t know. If she did know about the list, she certainly wouldn’t be sending me to any meetings. Hollywood doesn’t care if you’re innocent or guilty; they just don’t want to be anywhere near that kind of controversy. Friends who knew I had been named stopped inviting me out. I started to get depressed, because I was walking around with this awful secret. I’d look someone in the eye and I wouldn’t know what they knew about me. I couldn’t talk about what was happening without revealing that I had been accused of rape. …

Being accused of sexual misconduct is extremely alienating. #MeToo was an expression of solidarity but there is no solidarity for the accused. We don’t talk to one another. We assume that if someone else has been accused, there must be a good reason. We’re afraid of guilt by association.”

“People with disabilities are, for the most part, omitted from the conversation altogether.”

 Sarah Katz: “People with disabilities are, for the most part, omitted from the conversation altogether. “These types of laws are written without even thinking about how they’re going to impact people with disabilities—until we come forth and start talking about our experiences and how legislation like this is going to impact us,” Michelle Bishop, the manager of voter access and engagement at the National Disability Rights Network, told me. “People with disabilities are very often collateral damage in these conversations.””

Reflections on Canellos’ _The Great Dissenter_

In view of Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy, saying “the Constitution neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” what is the status of “protected class” at law?

If the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is today being implemented as protected class, should the stigmatized disabled, the CPs (Cerebral Palsy and Cleft Palate) for example, be in a protected class, in view of the pervasive social prejudice against them?

We seem to have two things going on. Protected Class as a term of art under a Constitution, not of classes, but of “all men,” according to the ringing phrase in the Declaration. And an obvious population at need, the demeaned, degraded, and marginalized disabled, rendered second class citizens and denied Equal Protection, because the public believes them not to have been included in that dodgy workaround, “Protected Class.”

Justice is universal, after all. No need to question where equal protection applies. No need to name who gets it and who doesn’t. No need to specify maligned disabled people so they won’t be left out. That’s the beauty of universalism. Martin Luther King recognized the inherent universalism of justice when he proclaimed one of what Milton called, “the known rules of ancient liberty”: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

But protected class is particularist. It is crosswise to true justice. It is Whac A Mole. It leaves as many out as it includes.

That’s one of the reasons there’s no Brown v Board, no Obergefell, no landmark civil rights case, for us. Nor the small routine defenses granted minorities: “There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities.”

No wonder the public attacks at will. Creates an uproar at parties, the subtext of which is, What’s a misfit doing at a party? Springs subtly crafted, socially deniable, public humiliations. Feels free to be openly scornful of us in our university classrooms, and in community housing. All of this imposing what Goffman called a “spoiled identity” without the countervailing influence of civil rights law.

Canellos begins The Great Dissenter, “The narrative turned … ruthlessly extinguished … a slow, menacing starvation. The ingredients for success … gradually withdrawn. … There was no recognition of their struggles, their accomplishments, or the tragedy of their lost hopes. There was only silence.”

He was talking about the the people the Civil War was fought to liberate, as a reactionary social movement determinedly dismantled the postwar Constitutional amendments.

Another deeply entrenched social attitude treats us as having a spoiled social identity and makes it impossible for many of us to live normal lives.

One of the recourses for those whom society will not accept is just law. But we were left out of the civil rights revolution. There is only silence.

A Preliminary Note on Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Meghan Daum, in The Problem with Everything:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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