The Disabled and the Left
Mickey Z (MZ) gives Mary Johnson (MJ) The Million Dollar Interview after first commenting that:
Journalist (and crip) John Hockenberry recently wrote that the same critics heaping praise on Clint Eastwood and "Million Dollar Baby" have "failed millions of Americans with disabilities by accepting as utterly plausible the plot-twist that a quadriplegic would sputter into medical agony in a matter of months and embrace suicide as her only option in a nation where millions of people with spinal cord injuries lead full long lives."...
I might add that the disabled are more than crips
. We have mental, motor, auditory, and visual impairments among others.
Towards the end of the interview, there is this exchange:
MZ: Why have progressives/radicals been so hesitant and/or resistant to aligning with the disability rights movement? It seems like a natural fit.
MJ: This is a theme I seem to return to over and over, for it is very painful for me-and for most of the disability activists I know-to realize that progressives are rarely any better on our issues than conservatives, and sometimes actually much worse. The concepts of individual rights and an egalitarian society, concepts that drive disability rights thinking, are borrowed from liberal ideology, and most of the activists in the movement today come from backgrounds in the civil rights, women's rights, anti-war movements of the 60s and 70s. Yet, get any group of disability activists together for more than a few minutes and you'll start hearing the familiar griping about how liberals don't "get" disability rights. ...
Emphasis Mine
I think this came to the fore during the case of Amar Ahmed Mohammed who was a Mongoli that was set up as a suicide bomber during the Iraqi elections. The conservative bloggers all condemned the plotters for this dastardly deed (rightly so) and also condemned the apparent silence from the liberal bloggers (again rightly so). (Mine is an obscure one). The conservatives were further justifying the war on Iraq in terms to get rid of these bastards, and were claiming the moral high ground over the liberals.
In this case, the conservatives were using the disabled to beat the liberals over the head for their indifference to the fate of Mr. Mohammed. Even mine own comment on this matter was pathetic.
My previous rants on this subject are at:
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