ABLEnews Extra

                        Roots

         We are grateful to Tom Dempsey--and Timothy
         Cook--for providing this enlightening history on
         ADA-LAW. In CURE's judgment, Dr. Henry Foster's
         history of eugenic sterilizations reeks of the
         same TAB bigotry and renders him unfit for the
         office of Surgeon General.
         
         [The following file may file may be freq'd as
         EUG50209.* from 1:109/909 and other BBS's that
         carry the ABLEFiles Distribution Network (AFDN)
         and--for about one week--ftp'd from FTP.FIDONET.ORG
         on the Internet. Please allow a few days for processing.]
         
I thought that this article reprinted from the Atlanta Post Polio
Association News might shed some light on the roots and reasons for the
ADA, as well as the importance of the continued struggle for our rights.

                  Tom

A Little History Worth Knowing

by Timothy M. Cook

The Alabama legislature declared them "a menace to the happiness...of
the community." A Texas law mandated segregation to relieve society of
the "heavy economic and moral losses arising from the existence at large
of these unfortunate persons."

Ancient penal statutes for convicted felons? NO!

Racial epithets from the Jim Crow era? Not quite, though these
declarations did arise in that period.

Such was the treatment accorded disabled persons, especially
those...with severe disabilities, by democratically elected state
legislatures, in this century.

Nor was the government-mandated regime of segregation, exclusion and
degradation of people with disabilities limited to the South. In every
state, in inexorable fashion, the policy was to keep us out of polite
society.

In Pennsylvania, disabled people officially were termed "anti-social
beings;" In Washington, "unfitted for companionship with other
children;" in Vermont, a "blight on mankind;" in Wisconsin, a "danger
to the race;" and, in Kansas, "a misfortune both to themselves and to
the public."

In Indiana, we were required to be "segregate[d] from the world;" a Utah
government report said that a "defect wounds our citizenry a thousand
times more than any plague;" and, in South Dakota, we simply did not
have the "rights and liberties of normal people."

The United States Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Oliver Wendall
Holmes upholding the constitutionality of a Virginia law authorizing the
involuntary sterilization of disabled persons, ratified the view of
disabled persons as "a menace." Justice Holmes juxtaposed the country's
"best citizens" (nondisabled persons) with those who "sap the strength
of the state" (disabled persons), and to avoid "being swamped with
incompetence," ruled "It is better for all the world, if instead of
waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve
for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit
from continuing their kind."

So, the next time someone tries to explain to you that handicappism is a
more "benign" form of discrimination, tell them how the segregation and
exclusion of people with disabilities all began. Tell them how,
historically, a lot of important decision-makers passed laws sending us
away.

ABLEnews Editor's Note: For additional coverage of eugenic
                        sterilization, see BUCK.* wherever
                        ABLETEXT files are found.

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