On 3/26/05, Doyle Saylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said in part:
> The last few days have been a trying time for
> the disability rights community. Our most militant
> grassroots groups (not dead yet, ADAPT) have
> come under attack across the country primarily
> because the Bush right has chosen to grand stand
> about Terri Schiavo's life and death in Florida.
The above "because,etc." is neither an accurate nor fair. The predominant
reason for disagreement with some of those recently claiming to speak for
ADAPT and "Not Dead Yet and some assertedly like minded others has not been
"because the Bush right has chosen to grand stand about Terri Schiavo's
life and death in Florida" but (quite apart from what "the Bush right" has
done) because several ADAPT/NDY,etc., spokespersons and some like-minded
others have (in too many instances: egregiously)
- misrepresented what/how the courts ruled the past and have been
doing the past week or so in the Schiavo-Shindler litigations,
- in so doing, adopted O'Reilly/Limbaugh/Delay/Frist-like tactics
(e.g., entirely without any factual or other reasonable basis to do, by
substituting vile fantasies of Mr. Schiavo's background and motives for
readily confirmable reality), and yet
- meanwhile failed coherently much less persuasively to formulate
arguments to advance the Not Dead Yet positions themselves.
> [O]n the whole the progressive community has
> embraced the right to suicide implications of
> the Schiavo case and exploded with rage at
> at the Disability community precisely because
> the disabled community chooses Schiavo as one
> our own.
These, too, are (at best) dubious claims. Though (obviously) there will be
person specific exceptions/qualifications re. who is in a "rage" against
who, and why, a far fairer because predominantly more accurate statement
is, first (though somewhat less importantly), that questions have
legitimately been raised about the degree to which some of the commentators
to which Doyle Saylor presumably here refers do represent "the [sic]
Disability community" (although, concededly, they represent some in that
"community" assuming that "community" is itself a fair characterization)
and, second, and more importantly, that in inaccurately characterizing what
Mr. Schiavo and the courts have done, the members of the "community"
apparently here referred to have failed in ways that are adequately
persuasively to explicate the "suicide implications" and related concerns
that are destructive to the "disability community" or more broadly to
society in general.
