WBEZ | disability

The GOP votes against international disability accord

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 08:30:00 -0600

In the midst of all the headlines about how the cold-hearted GOP won’t pass a middle-class tax cut until the president agrees to a tax cut on the rich, on Tuesday the Senate came up short on the two-thirds vote required to ratify the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, a United Nations treaty aimed at securing rights for disabled people around the world.

The vote was 61-38, and all 38 votes against setting international standards to protect and accommodate the disabled were cast by Republicans.

The treaty, based on the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act, is a non-binding international standard — as opposed to law or requirement — and demands no change whatsoever to U.S. law. The ADA, if you'll recall, was signed into law by GOP president George H.W. Bush in 1990, and was renewed by Barack Obama in 2009.

This treaty has eight guiding principles: respect for inherent dignity, individual autonomy including the freedom to make one's own choices; non-discrimination; full and effective participation and inclusion in society; respect for difference; equality of opportunity; accessibility; equality between men and women; respect for the evolving capacities of children with disabilities and respect for the right of children with disabilities to preserve their identities.

Because the treaty is designed as an international agreement that must also accommodate the resources and abilities of its complying countries — many of whom, like Afghanistan and Uganda, don’t necessarily have the money to do all they might want to do — it goes out of its way to ease compliance. For example, it only requires “reasonable accommodation” of the disabled, what the treaty calls "necessary and appropriate modification and adjustments not imposing a disproportionate or undue burden."

In fact, the treaty provides a great deal of flexibility to its signers. So much so that a number of countries — understanding that the treaty is in great part about intent — adopted it with exemptions and conditions. Both Malta and Poland interpreted the agreement without a right to abortion, in accordance with their constitutions; the Netherlands interpreted the right to medical treatment as also including the right to refuse medical treatment. And so on.

Eight Republicans did vote for the treaty, including all three outgoing senators, plus John McCain, Susan Collins, John Barraso, the ever more independent Lisa Murkowski and that other presidential candidate in the wings, Kelly Ayotte. So what was it that made 38 Republican senators, including all-but-announced presidential candidate Marco Rubio, vote against it? Here’s an explanation from GOP Sen. Mike Lee, who led the floor fight against the treaty: “I and many of my constituents who home-school or send their children to religious schools have justifiable doubt that a foreign body based in Geneva, Switzerland, should be deciding what is best for a child at home in Utah.”

Setting aside the ungrammatical use of “I,” who is Sen. Lee talking about? The UN is an international body based in New York.

Sen. Lee’s partner on the quest to defeat the treaty was former Republican senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum, the father of a special needs child, who’s been crusading since at least July on this issue.

Their big complaint, besides fear of all things outside the Great 48, is anxiety that the treaty could somehow undermine parental rights over disabled children, especially those in home schools.

But the treaty, which requires nothing and merely sets aspirational standards, does no such thing. And, even if it did, the U.S. Constitution’s federal supremacy clause would trump any international agreement’s particular clause.

I shared the news of the treaty’s defeat Tuesday on my Facebook page and my brother Mario responded with what I think is the best rejoinder to these very ignorant and shameless lawmakers: “As a parent who homeschooled their kids, I'm confident my kids would understand the phrase ‘nonbinding treaty’ and know how to spot xenophobia.”

Poet Sheila Black considers pain, disability, selfhood and ‘the problem of normal’

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 11:00:00 -0500

Sheila Black was born with a rare medical condition that gave her crooked legs. Then when she was 13 years old, she underwent a procedure to straighten them -- although the word “procedure” might not adequately describe what she went through.

“I had my legs radically straightened,” she says. In the first of a number of surgeries Black would have over the course of her life, doctors performed a double osteotomy -- breaking her legs in six places, then re-pinning the bones back together. “I walked a lot better [after the surgery],” Black recalls. “But I had the strange sense of having betrayed the person I was.” Black elaborated: “For me the question of disability was really a problem of normal. The problem was all the normal people out there."

Black grew into an award-winning poet whose creative interests include what a collaborator has described as “anomalous embodiment,” or what one might more simply describe as physical disability. In one poem she channels that moment of teenage post-surgical self-betrayal, and imagines herself as two people – the person she was before the surgery, and the person she became afterward, as if existing side by side:

She
was me before I became so fallen. Sneaking
Salem cigarettes with the other girls on the fourth
floor bathroom. Trying so hard to fit in you could
see that desire—a sheen on my skin. The year I
learned to walk again—a wheelchair, crutches, crutches
discarded, everyone said how it was a miracle, so
wonderful, such a great, great thing, as if I could now
be welcomed into the club of people. A door closed
somewhere, and she was behind it.

The poem’s title, “Los Dos Fridas or Script for the Erased,” alludes to the title of a 1939 self-portrait by Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, in which Kahlo also depicts two versions of herself side by side: one injured and one healthy, arteries intertwined. Kahlo was in a bus crash at age 18 that left her with a horrifying array of broken bones – pelvis, spine, clavicle, ribs, plus 11 fractures in her leg – as well as permanent damage to her reproductive system. She went through more than 30 surgeries over the course of her life, and was often in so much pain that she had to remain bedridden for weeks at a time.

Black says that she too experienced extreme pain because of her disability and surgeries, but that Kahlo’s work and legacy proved to be a powerful example of working through the pain. “Frida Kahlo taught me to see [pain] as sort of a forceful, creative thing,” Black explains. “A way of making me pay attention to the world around me.”

Together with co-editors Jennifer Bartlett and Michael Northen, Black helped assemble the anthology Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011), which collects the work of several differently-abled writers.

Nine poets from the anthology read in Chicago earlier this month, including Black. You can hear her recite “Los Dos Fridas” in the audio above.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Sheila Black read at an event presented by Access Living in March. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Illinois state officials review abuse of disabled placards

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:13:00 -0600

Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White is looking to increase penalties for drivers who illegally park in spots reserved for the disabled.

Starting in January, White said his office will look into increasing fines for those who illegally park in reserved spots without a placard and for those who use fraudulent placards. This comes after Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel proposed fine increases for those who use fake, stolen or altered disability placards to park.

"I think it's a violation of all laws of human decency for you to be able bodied but yet you want to take advantage of a program that has been set aside for those in need," said White.

White said he's considering upping the fines for illegally using disability permits to more than $2,000. Current fines for motorists start at $350 for parking without a placard, and a $500 fine and 30-day driver's license suspension for those illegally using one.

White also said his office will again increase enforcement of disability parking rules at malls during the holiday season. Secretary of State police will be outposted at malls in Schaumburg, Rockford, Springfield and Marion on Black Friday and through the weekend. A spokesperson for White's office says this is the first year Secretary of State police will target several malls on Black Friday since the upped enforcement began in 2005.

The spokesperson said the office's police force will move mall-by-mall throughout the state through the remainder of the year.

Modeling Blind

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 18:55:00 -0600

Finding a job is hard. Finding a job when you’re disabled can be even harder.

Beth Finke knows this first hand. She lost her job when she lost her sight in the 1980s, and relied on her husband to read the classifieds to her aloud every Sunday night.

She’d later become a well regarded writer and commentator, and the only blind woman in America to be honored for sports broadcasting, for a story on the White Sox she produced for WBEZ. But on her way to success she found a job she never expected to land - as a nude model for a college art class. She told the story to a live audience during the 2010 Access Living event Blood on the Tracks: A Disability Culture Cabaret. In the audio excerpt posted above, Finke describes how she landed the gig, and the unique pros and cons that come with doing the job blind.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Beth Finke spoke to an audience assembled by Access Living in September of 2010. Click here to hear her talk in its entirety, and click here to subscribe to the Dynamic Range podcast.