Everyone Has a Stake -- Part One

Part Two

"The whole society has a stake in making sure state courts are not tainted by prejudices, myths and unfounded fears -- like the unthinking horror in mainstream society that transforms feeding tubes into fetish objects, emblematic of broader, deeper fears of disability that sometimes slide from fear to disgust and from disgust to hatred. While we should not assume that disability prejudice tainted the Florida courts, we cannot reasonably assume that it did not."
     -- Harriet McBryde Johnson, Washington Post, March 25, 2005, objecting to the starvation of Terri Schindler Schiavo.

"The exhibit [Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race, now at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum] tells of a eugenics movement that sought to apply principles from Darwin and animal husbandry to humans. In Germany, it proceeded step by step from voluntary 'healthy baby' campaigns to forced sterilization and the murder of some 200,000 disabled children and adults."
     -- Johnson in yesterday's New York Times Magazine.

Harriet McBryde Johnson is a lawyer and a disability rights activist best known for a memorable debate she had in 2002 with philosopher Peter Singer recounted in a piece she subsequently wrote for the New York Times Magazine. I re-read her essay this morning and Singer's cheerful affability as he explains why we ought to "legalize the killing of certain babies who might come to be like me if allowed to live." It was as scary today as it was when I first read "Unspeakable Conversation" in early 2003.

Singer was polite, almost courtly leading up to and during their 2002 debate at Princeton. It was as if Singer was saying, "Having trouble with your microphone? Let me help you with it so we can have a stimulating intellectual discussion over why you oughtn't to be alive to have this debate in the first place."

Defenders of Terri Schindler Schiavo may recall that I wrote about Ms. Johnson's eloquent defense of Terri based on a piece that ran first in the online publication Slate and then was reprinted in the Washington Post. If you read "Overlooked in the Shadows," you were the beneficiary of an excellent primer on  disability-rights.

The "shadows" was a reference in a speech given during the time Congress frantically sought passage of a law to give Terri's parents another avenue to appeal their daughter's death sentence: "There are a lot of people in the shadows, all over this country, who are incapacitated because of a disability, and many times there is no one to speak for them."

Johnson's op-ed that ran in Sunday's New York Times Magazine was pegged to a speech she will give tonight at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. D.C. She writes that she will be interviewed onstage by a museum official in reference to an exhibition, Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race.

If you go to the museum's web page, you'll immediately encounter this from Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda: "OUR STARTING POINT IS NOT THE INDIVIDUAL, AND WE DO NOT SUBSCRIBE TO THE VIEW THAT ONE SHOULD FEED THE HUNGRY, GIVE DRINK TO THE THIRSTY, OR CLOTHE THE NAKED . . . . OUR OBJECTIVES ARE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT: WE MUST HAVE A HEALTHY PEOPLE IN ORDER TO PREVAIL IN THE WORLD."

With that as an operating philosophy, it was not much of a jump for the Nazis to enact policies and protocols that resulted in the murder of  "some 200,000 disabled children and adults."
Johnson writes that the exhibition goes on to tell "how the eugenics dragnet widened, of the way concentration strategies, gas-chamber technology and sterilization techniques first designed for disabled people were applied against whole populations defined as genetically undesirable." [You can read Johnson's "Wheelchair Unbound" in its entirety at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/magazine/23lives.html]

Please note that I am not comparing what happened to Terri to the institutional Nazi slaughter of people with disabilities, a murderous movement fueled by the obsession with "eugenics."

I am saying that people who cannot speak for themselves are always and ever on a precipice. If we do not keep that at the forefront of our minds, helpless people will die silently behind a cloak of concern for "privacy."

Ms. Johnson concludes that "I hope to live and die in a world that recognizes that killing, even of people with the most severe disabilities, is a matter of more than private concern." She's right. It is a concern to people just like you and me.

Please send your comments and questions to Dave Andrusko at dandrusko@nrlc.org.

Part Two