Saturday, June 18, 2005

I was blind to that

For years I've been calling religion a crutch. And I've taken from a movie with the guy who played Kramer on Seinfeld that it's OK to use a crutch if you need it. The other day I was writing this down in a assignment for a class and I realized that this too is abelist language. I imagine I'll be rooting out this language for years.

The Normal Pill

The question of whether people with disabilities would take a pill to make them "normal" if it was available has been asked at various times of various people with disabilities. It's interesting that a lot of them say no, particularly when they don't have access to resources that help mitigate some of the social factors that make living with a disability so difficult. It never occurred to me to flip this question on its head: Would I take a pill that would make me accept people for who they are? "I suspect that given the choice of taking a pill to become normal or giving normal people a pill to accept differences, most people with disabling labels would choose the latter." - Herbet Lovett.