At a roundtable on Tuesday with disability rights activists, Vice President Kamala Harris and the activists in attendance introduced themselves not only by stating their pronouns, but also by giving a visual description of themselves, including figured out what they were wearing. The VP said, “I’m Kamala Harris, my pronouns are her and her, and I’m a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit.”
We have reached the point where the Conservatives not only make fun of people with disabilities, but also people who recognize people with disabilities.
Providing a visual description has become a standard courtesy to help people who are blind. But 32 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, we have reached the point where conservatives not only openly mock people with disabilities, but also mock people who acknowledge the existence of disabled people.
My stomach turned when I saw Greg Price, a former Daily Caller reporter, laughing at the language used by Harris and these disability rights activists. When it was pointed out to Price that providing such visual descriptions was meant to help the visually impaired, he also scoffed at that explanation and accused the people around that table of “deliberately excluding” color blind people. As a colorblind myself, I can say Price’s answer is ridiculous. We often need people to tell us what color things are when we can’t.
A right-wing provocateur doing this right-wing provocateur stuff isn’t worth losing any sleep over. What was truly unconscionable was seeing the Republican National Committee research account tweeting the video but, as one Twitter user pointed out, only after removing captions from the original video intended to help hard of hearing. Even Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republican members of the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, scoffed.
Conservative senators such as Bob Dole and Orrin Hatch and patrician Republicans such as Lowell Weicker and former President George HW Bush saw the promotion of disability rights as the next frontier of freedom, but they are long gone. Donald Trump, the last Republican president, was perhaps the most active president of the past 40 years, going so far as to instruct White House staff not to include wounded veterans in military parades because ” nobody wants to see that.” Trump has also bungled the response to a pandemic that has hit people with disabilities even harder, causing untold numbers of people to die unnecessarily.
It’s no surprise, then, that Republicans celebrated the 32nd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act without fanfare, but instead attacked the vice president who used language meant to make people with disabilities feel included. . RNC research director Zach Parkinson then tried to clarify that they were making fun of Harris for the fact that she “chooses to infantilize the people she speaks with by announcing her pronouns”.
As for the vice president describing herself as a woman, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, retweeted the RNCR post with the question, “But what is a woman? It was repeating a question Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., asked Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during the Supreme Court’s confirmation hearing. When I asked Cruz what his response to Harris’ introduction was, he said he didn’t care “because she was repeating the silly practice of specifying her pronouns.”
Cruz said he didn’t care “because she was repeating the silly practice of specifying her pronouns”.
He said: “I have been a long-time disability advocate. However, Kamala Harris is part of the woke left like you who believes you can’t define what a woman is. When I asked Cruz if, putting aside the question of advertised pronouns, describing what you wear would be a good idea, he replied: “Of course.”
Despite claiming to be a “longtime advocate” for people with disabilities, in 2012, even before Cruz was sworn in as a senator, he pressured his fellow Republicans to oppose the US entry into a UN treaty that raised standards for how people with disabilities should be cared for. Republicans killed the Senate floor legislation as Dole, co-author of the Americans With Disabilities Act, watched.
Parkinson’s and Cruz’s answers are superficial and dishonest. If all they had wanted to do was make fun of the VP for announcing her pronouns, they could have just called attention to her by saying “my pronouns are her and her.” But they didn’t stop the video there. They also drew negative attention to her by providing a visual description. it doesn’t explain why Marco Rubio went on Fox Business and said, “I’m the man on screen in the gray suit.”
At the same time, we must not let Parkinson and Cruz try to separate people from the disability rights movement from people from the LGBTQ movement. Gay men have long been advocates for people with disabilities, dating back to when the Gay Men’s Butterfly Brigade supported activist sit-ins at a San Francisco federal building in the 1970s.
In fact, Lydia Brown, one of the people at Tuesday’s roundtable with Harris and someone I interviewed for my autism book, is non-binary. So many people with autism identify as part of the LGBTQ community that when I go to autism events, I’m only half kidding when I say I’m in the minority as a heterosexual cisgender male.
It’s not to give a free pass to the vice-president. As the first presidential candidate to publish a disability policy, she angered disability rights activists when she laughed in response to a member of the public calling Trump the ‘r’ word. She then apologized. Disability rights campaigners also feared that the mental health policy she proposed when she was a presidential candidate would lead to further unnecessary institutionalization. I have also publicly stated that the Biden administration’s response to the pandemic leaves people with disabilities for dead.
One of the people at Tuesday’s roundtable with Harris is non-binary.
All of this makes Conservative bankruptcy due to disability even more frustrating. While people with disabilities need the strength of government to uphold and protect their rights, liberals are often incredibly condescending and act as if people with disabilities have to settle for crumbs. A conservative mindset that believes in using government to empower people with disabilities while promoting individual liberty can be a valid counterbalance to liberal paternalistic tendencies.
But the Conservatives don’t care anymore. They would rather “own the libs” than offer a substantial alternative. Democrats have an uneven record when it comes to advocating for the rights of people with disabilities, and knowing that people with disabilities cannot realistically transition to Republicans, Democrats have little incentive to do more for them, and people with disabilities have less incentive. to ask for more. And if people with disabilities are afraid to push for what’s possible, then the spirit of the ADA is dead.