ASAN Statement Regarding the Newtown Shootings

I have a lot of disability-law related news to report from this past week, and I'm sure I'll post it tomorrow, but I'm still sufficiently shocked and saddened by yesterday's events in Connecticut that I can't really bring myself to do it today.  Twenty kids killed -- and little kids at that.  It crushes the heart. So all I'll post today is this statement that my friends at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network put out regarding the shootings:

In response to recent media reports that the perpetrator of today’s shooting in Newton, Connecticut may have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum or with a psychiatric disability, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) issued the following statement today: 

“Our hearts go out to the victims of today’s shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut and their families. Recent media reports have suggested that the perpetrator of this violence, Adam Lanza, may have been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, a diagnosis on the autism spectrum, or with another psychiatric disability. In either event, it is imperative that as we mourn the victims of this horrific tragedy that commentators and the media avoid drawing inappropriate and unfounded links between autism or other disabilities and violence. Autistic Americans and individuals with other disabilities are no more likely to commit violent crime than non-disabled people. In fact, people with disabilities of all kinds, including autism, are vastly more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators. Should the shooter in today’s shooting prove to in fact be diagnosed on the autism spectrum or with another disability, the millions of Americans with disabilities should be no more implicated in his actions than the non-disabled population is responsible for those of non-disabled shooters. 

"Today’s violence was the act of an individual. We urge media, government and community leaders to speak out against any effort to spuriously link the Autistic or broader disability community with violent crime. Autistic Americans and other groups of people with disabilities persist in facing discrimination and segregation in school, the workplace and the general community. In this terrible time, our society should not further stigmatize our community. As our great nation has so many times in the past, let us come together to both mourn those killed by acts of heinous murder and defend all parts of our country from the scourge of stigma and prejudice.” 

Media inquiries regarding this shooting may be directed to ASAN at info@autisticadvocacy.org.

A Good Perspective on the NYT on Serial Litigation

See this interesting blog post.  An excerpt:

My caregiving job emphasized community integration, so I took people on lots of walks and transit outings in different neighborhoods in the Portland area. When that’s the crux of your work, you learn pretty quickly which sidewalks are passable and which are just slightly overgrown with hedges; you learn which sidewalks have appropriate curb cuts and which sections of the neighborhood are better traversed right on the street. You learn whose wheelchair will fit on the bus and whose won’t. 

And you learn which businesses are accessible and which are not. Obviously, you avoid the latter. Planning dates — and these days, planning my own forays into the community — requires a similar, but different, set of calculations about what’s accessible and what isn’t. 

What I’m getting at is that if you write that no one is being hurt by a lack of accessibility, you’re right, but only because the ambulance chaser analogy and framing is fundamentally flawed. That people with disabilities are in many cases more likely to accept segregation than to seek out — and attempt to access — businesses they know aren’t going to be accessible for them doesn’t surprise me. Nor does it surprise me that some plaintiffs have shown little interest in accessing businesses named in the claims their names were attached to. Most of us — able-bodied or not — only visit places we can get to, and where we’ll feel comfortable, and avoid places that don’t fit that category for so long they just drop off our internal map and out of our routine.

Jacob Sullum Gets It About Serial ADA Litigation

Over at the Reason blog (which I highly recommend, though I certainly don't always agree with), Jacob Sullum has a good post about the Times's article yesterday on serial ADA litigation.  The key language:

If you accept the ADA's premise, which is that the government should force business owners to bear the cost of making the world more navigable for disabled people, you should be grateful to lawyers like Weitz for helping enforce that rule. More than two decades after the law was passed, Weitz is rooting out violators and making them comply, all at no cost to taxpayers.

New York Times Discovers Serial ADA Litigation

See this article from today's paper.  My views on this issue are a matter of public record: The ADA has been on the books for more than 20 years.  Private lawsuits are, as a practical matter, the only way to effectively enforce the law against businesses that are still violating it.  And Congress recognized that private lawsuits will not be brought unless successful plaintiffs can recover attorneys' fees.  So if the suits brought by serial litigators are legally meritorious -- and extremely often, those suits are -- the fact that their lawyers are motivated by money and not by abstract do-gooderism may seem tacky to some, but that's how Congress designed the system.  I continually fail to understand why it's okay for defendants' lawyers to be motivated by money, but it's the worst thing ever when plaintiffs' lawyers are.

In Which I Anger My Friends

I applaud the intellectual disability community for their remarkably successful (but still sadly incomplete) efforts to raise consciousness that the word "retarded" and its derivatives carry, in our culture and society, a legacy of dehumanization and exclusion.  I, for one, am now much more attuned to the way people use the slur in their day-to-day speech and how harmful that is.  I know this is true of lots of people outside the disability community as well, and I think we need to continue to work so that the word is understood to be the kind of group-based slur, like the n-word and similar expressions, that is by consensus understood as inappropriate in everyday speech.  We, alas, still have too long a way to go.

But every so often, I worry that people who are engaged in these incredibly important efforts at consciousness raising want to prevent all use of the r-word even in artistic expression.  This post, objecting to the use of the word by two characters in a brief scene in the new George Clooney movie The Descendants, comes uncomfortably close to the line for me.  Although it's the point of some movies and literature to present us an idealized version of ourselves, perhaps as a way of calling us to act up to those ideals, movies and literature would be incredibly impoverished -- if not stultifying and oppressive -- if that was the point of all of them.  People use the r-word in real life, just like they use slurs against other groups (and just like they do other harmful and wrongful things), and it would be wrong to say that movies and literature can't depict that.  (And I think it's a cheat to say that the use of the word can be depicted but only if the character who uses it "learns the lesson" that it's wrong or is otherwise shown to be a bad and unsympathetic character.  That's not any different than requiring purely idealized depictions of people.)

Now, one can argue about whether the use of the word in the movie or book at issue works as literature, and, particularly if it doesn't, whether the use of the word bespeaks a more general prejudice of the author or the story.  The reference in the blog post I linked above to the "gratuitous" use of the word hints at those questions.  I haven't seen The Descendants or read the book on which it's based, so I am not equipped to have an opinion on that issue here.  I also think that it's great to use an occasion like this -- the use of the r-word in a major motion picture vehicle involving one of our biggest movie stars -- as a teaching and organizing moment.  I think it's totally in bounds to criticize a movie or book, or its creators, for demonstrating or feeding bias (though I think those criticisms raise complex issues about how to read literature and what it's for).  I thought that at least one of the writers of Tropic Thunder could be criticized on that ground, based on the way he defended the treatment of people with intellectual disabilities in that movie, though criticism is different than a boycott.   To the extent that the blog post I linked simply seeks to provoke a teaching and organizing moment, I'm all for it.

But I worry that some of the language in the blog post I link to above -- e.g., wondering just how George Clooney and Alexander Payne, who seem to be such good people, could use such a hurtful word in a movie; applauding Fox Searchlight for overdubbing and removing the word from the DVD release of Miss March (another movie I haven't seen); and suggesting that Clooney, Payne, and Fox Searchlight "should . . . be held accountable" here -- suggests that the r-word should never be used in a film, at least without trying to extract a moral from it.  That just seems wrong to me.  (I think it's different when a person like LeBron James, speaking in his own voice and not as an author or actor, uses the word as an actual slur.)  The intellectual disability community has demonstrated beyond doubt that the r-word is, in this society at this time, as harmful and hurtful a word as the n-word or the small handful of other slurs like it are.  But I wouldn't say that movies that use any of those words should be boycott.

Davis on Tropic Thunder

Lennard Davis, a leading figure in disability studies, has this op-ed on Tropic Thunder in the Chicago Tribune.

Patricia Bauer on Tropic Thunder

Patricia Bauer has this very good op-ed in the Washington Post on the Tropic Thunder controversy that does a great job of putting the controversy in context. As I haven't yet seen the movie, I can't say whether I agree or not with Bauer's bottom line -- despite my earlier comments decrying the seemingly bias-driven statements by the movie's co-writer, a lot that I've heard (including a lot in Bauer's column) suggests that the use of the R-word in the movie might well just be a particularly raw (and effective?) way of attacking some stereotypes that Hollywood brings to the issue of disability. But whatever one thinks of the film itself, the conversation it has sparked is really important.

Tropic Thunder

I haven't posted anything about this whole Tropic Thunder boycott business, mainly because I have a soft spot for Howard Stern and Sarah Silverman (not to mention Ben Stiller, who my wife can't stand) and (thus) tend to find the question of offensive humor to be much more complex than either those who are outraged by that humor or those who are outraged at "political correctness" seem to think. Also, I don't particularly like boycotts of expression, and I don't think it's possible to debate the merits of a movie I haven't seen. But I find this defense, from one of the co-writers of the film, quite outrageous myself:

"Some people have taken this as making fun of handicapped people, but we're really trying to make fun of the actors who use this material as fodder for acclaim," co-writer Etan Cohen echoed to MTV. "The last thing you want is for people to think you're making fun of the victims in this who are having their lives turned into fodder for people to win Oscars."

The joke, then, is really on people like Dustin Hoffman ("Rain Man"), Sean Penn, ("I Am Sam") and Tom Hanks ("Forrest Gump"), actors who do more harm than good by denying the painful realities of the illness and instead paint their characters as too sunny or bright, Cohen said.

"Movies about the mentally retarded is something we talked about for a long time. My grandfather was adopted by a mentally retarded man, a man who shouldn't have been allowed to adopt a kid," Cohen revealed. "When he saw 'Forrest Gump,' you ever saw a guy angrier than him. It was not such a picnic to be raised by that guy."

I mean, sheesh! This certainly seems to suggest that the motivation is just pure bias. I'm sorry about Mr. Cohen's great-grandfather, but seriously, do you think it was political correctness, or too many Tom Hanks movies, that led the authorities to let him adopt Mr. Cohen's grandfather? Was Tom Hanks even born yet? There are good adoptive parents and there are crappy adoptive parents, and that's true of people with and without disabilities. Basically, Mr. Cohen seems to be saying that he used this film as a chance to get back at his great-grandfather and all of those other people with disabilities who were unjustly portrayed so positively by Messrs. Hoffman, Penn, and Hanks, when really, you know, they should have been institutionalized. Or, more charitably, he wanted to show the "other side" -- that it really sucks to have a disability, though Hollywood tries to paper it over. I guess he never saw Million Dollar Baby.

ADA Watch/NCDR: Talk Radio Should Fire Michael Savage

To be honest, I've never listened to Michael Savage and barely knew who he was. (I thought he was this guy, which seems like the kind of mistake that will offend both of them.) And I don't, on this blog, take a position on whether folks should be fired. But this is pretty appalling:

The leader of a national coalition of disability, civil rights and social justice organizations called on Talk Radio Network to fire talk radio host, Michael Savage for his hateful attacks on children and adults with physical and mental disabilities. Jim Ward, founder and president of ADA Watch and the National Coalition for Disability Rights (NCDR), stated:

"ADA Watch/NCDR calls on Talk Radio Network to fire Michael Savage. As America prepares to celebrate the 18th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on July 26th, people with disabilities, parents, family members, friends and advocates across the nation are outraged over Savage's latest attack on people with disabilities. His despicable assault on children with autism -- calling them "frauds" and "brats" -- is rightly being condemned as hateful and bigoted. But it is just the latest of Savage's numerous and painful attempts to demean and disenfranchise people with disabilities."

Savage has also used his bully-pulpit to declare that:

-- High levels of asthma impacting minority children was because "the children got extra welfare if they were disabled." (July 2008)

-- The "handicapped" workers at the Phoenix Cafe would "drool" and put dung in diners food. He made up names for the food on the menu, such as "nutburger." (July 2002)

-- Members of the disability rights community are the "Wheelchair Mafia."

-- The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the world's first civil rights law for people with disabilities, should be called the "Lawyers' Improvement Act."

-- His political opponents are "degenerate slime bags" with "mental disorders" and have a "virus like leukemia."

-- When he was younger, he "touched the hand of a midget [Dwarf]," it really "freaked him out" and, since that episode, he doesn't like public places. (June 2004)

-- The "autism lobby of devastated parents is just a scam to get more money."

Takes One to Know One

Can you believe that Showtime gives these guys a forum for this kind of glibertarian propaganda? They're much better comedians than propagandists, anyway. I've seen lots of folks make libertarian arguments sound appealing, but these guys seem incapable of doing anything other than preaching to the converted.

Disability Rights Hits TAPPED

Over at TAPPED, the blog of the American Prospect, Ben Adler has this interesting disability rights-oriented post about the whole Ashley business. Surf on over and check it out.