I have had a disability all my life. According to current statistics (most of which are really the products of guess work) there are over 54 million Americans like me. One would fancy that people with disabilities (hereafter abbreviated as pwds) would in fact compose a mighty voting block. As you'll see from the post below, I am celebrating the efforts of Representatives Sensebrenner and Hoyt to restore the civil rights enforcement powers to the Americans with Disabilities Act, powers which have been diminished by several rulings of the rightward Supreme Court.
A few days ago I had the pleasure of attending an event at Ohio State University that was sponsored by a coalition of student groups who want to make certain that pwds in Ohio have the opportunity to vote in this November's election. As you may recall, during the election of 2004 there were long lines at the polling places in Ohio and many voters had to wait for up to 9 hours to cast their ballots. This was a particuarly difficult thing for pwds to do. This time around we can cast absentee ballots and of course we're being assured that the problems at the polling places have been rectified.
What interests me is that pwds are at once a mighty interest group and yet they are simultaneously fractured beyond utility as a voting block. It can be argued that this is a particularly American problem in the age of broken two party politics and leave the matter there, but I am convinced that pwds have a more serious problem on their hands or assistive prosthetics.
More and more we are seeing the devisive name calling of the broken party system working at the grassroots level in the disability rights communities. This is a different time than the late 1980's when pwds were able to effectively lobby for their civil rights with Congress and the White House. What has changed? In the nearly twenty years since leaders like Justin Dart and Senator Tom Harkin took up the cause of the ADA we have watched a "post civil rights complacency" come over the disability communities. As we argue amongst ourselves about curb cuts vs. the needs of the blind to locate street crossings; as we argue about "Big D Deafness" vs. "Hard of Hearing" Deafness; as we argue about Braille readers vs. those who read electronically; as we argue about whether one has to be fluent in ASL to call himself hearing impaired; as we argue over the full range of Benthamite utilities that seem so important we are forgetting that civil rights, our civil rights have been severely restricted by a Supreme Court that has chosen to use the 11th amendment to the constitution to argue that Congress has no authority to enact civil rights legislation at all. This is a time for unity if ever there was one.
I am discouraged today by the ongoing shenanigans at Gallaudet University where some students are arguing that the members of their board of trustees are insufficiently deaf, or are insufficiently fluent in ASL, or are "too deaf" or whatever, all because they don't like the new deaf president at their school. What these students want is a glorious fight like the one that preceded the selection of I. King Jourdan as Gallaudet's first deaf president almost twenty years ago. What these angry students want is a "good fight" in which they are vanquishing the forces of ableism. So they've been attacking deaf people. They have been tireless in this business of name calling. It's time for this nonsense to stop. Stop not just in the deaf community but in the other constituent communities that make up the pwds world. If you are too blind to read this blog wihtout a magnification program or a screen reader you are simply blind. I don't care if you're a "high partial" blind person or a fully blind since birth living without light blind person. As far as the ableist culture is concerned you're both blind and you better learn to champion one another's civil rights. And you better do it now.
The rights of pwds affect the elderly, the poor, and all races and creeds, all sexual orientations, all ethnicities. Disability rights are everybody's business.
SK
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