HUMOR

Strange Editorial Bedfellows

by Mike Ervin

From New Mobility, October, 2003. Reprinted with permission of magazine and author.

Last year I wrote a guest editorial for the Chicago Tribune. In it I ripped the guy who wrote a previous editorial in passionate defense of Carol Carr.

Carol Carr had just gone into an Atlanta-area nursing home and shot to death her two sons who were disabled by Huntington's disease. You know how it went from there. Her neighbors and the media rallied around her as a loving mother who acted out of mercy and should therefore face no punishment. It's a journalistic story line so common it's become a cliche.

My basic point was that there's no reason in this century - and especially in this country - why anyone should have to feel like a burden. If Carr and her sons felt they had nowhere to go besides a nursing home, there are a lot of things we should do about that besides shoot them like old horses.

The Tribune article titled my piece "There's No Such Thing as Mercy Killing." It got picked up by an anti-abortion news service called Lifenews.com and from there I ended up with some strange editorial bedfellows. I was on religious and conservative Web sites mixed in with some pretty heavy bashing of gays and that evil menace Planned Parenthood. There I was next to an article about Miss Illinois preaching sexual abstinence.

Why is it that conservatives are on the side of folks with disabilities only when it comes to making sure we are not aborted or euthanized? During the in-between journey, they do their best to make life as difficult as possible. When it comes to disability rights, the conservative motto ought to be: Live long and prosper, but screw you if you want health insurance like mine.

My guess is these are the same forces who have been trying to get the South Carolina state legislature to commission a monument to the anti- abortion movement. They want it to be a 6-foot-tall statue of a fetus. I kid you not.

I love the way Congressman Barney Frank put it: "'Conservatives' interest in life begins at conception and ends at birth."

Here's an example of what he means. Lifenews.com editor Steven Ertelt urged his readers to contact their senators and push them to support the Bush nomination of Alabama Attorney General William Pryor to the U.S. Court of Appeals. The only thing Pryor seems to oppose as passionately as he opposes abortion is the ADA. He pushed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court the case of Alabama v. Garrett, which knocked a big hole in our ability to sue states for employment discrimination under the ADA. Pryor said he doesn't believe there's any evidence to show state governments have a history of discriminating against us. He also doesn't believe that there's any evidence to show the moon is not made of green cheese.

You would think that an ideologically consistent conservative would be the first to advocate for our demise. If you get rid of us, then there's no need for that onerous ADA.

In an attempt to understand this weird blip in the otherwise flat conservative brain wave, I consulted the Mike Ervin Archive of Great Historic Disability Events, Both Real and Imagined. There I found the writings of Donald Maudlin, a leader in the 1940s "Hire the Handicapped" movement. Maudlin was founder and CEO of We Know Best, Inc., which ran summer camps for kids with Attention Deficit Disorder. There they would be taught the discipline it takes to concentrate. For instance, they wouldn't get any supper until they could recite the Gettysburg address.

These were known as the We Know Best Concentration Camps. But Maudlin didn't stop there. He went on to form the first sheltered workshops, where people with all sorts of disabilities made wooden doorstops.

It was in the 1962 We Know Best annual stockholders report where he seized the opportunity to react to an article in a science fiction magazine that predicted some day genetic disabilities would be detected in the womb and the fetuses aborted:

"Those of us who have seen what handicapped people are capable of are horrified at the prospect. I look at Jimmy the retarded boy and I ask myself, 'What if he had never been born?' He happily whittles doorstops for 16 hours a day. In 16 years he's never taken a sick day, even when he had cholera. And he's delighted to be making 15 cents a week. I can't imagine a world without Jimmy."

Now I understand.

Mike Ervin is a Chicago-area writer, disability activist and co-founder of Jerry's Orphans.

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