A comment from @politicsistheopiateofthemasses:
Who, precisely, is out there in the world acting as the champion opponent to rights for the disabled? How big is the anti-disabled movement?
This is actually a very good question, whether or not it’s being asked in good faith.
If, by that question, you mean “Who is actively lobbying against Disability Rights?”
The immediate answer, over the last 30-35 years, is “The Business Community,” (if such a thing can be said to even exist, beyond political rhetoric). Of course, they don’t call themselves “anti-Disabled.” But then again, Real Estate agents and Homeowners’ Associations don’t call themselves anti-Black, either. But if you look at the consequences of their actions….
For starters, Section 14[c] of the Fair Labor Standards Act allows for Disabled Employees to be paid far below our current minimum wage, as long as the person’s disability negatively impacts their level of productivity. This gives employers an incentive to hire disabled people for jobs they are actually unsuited for.*
Also, I was active in the lobbying to get the Americans with Disabilities Act passed, back between 1989-90. In order to get the law passed at all, a whole passel of concessions had to have been made to appease the “pro-business” lobby in the Senate, including loopholes and vague language like a business is exempt from making itself accessible or from hiring disabled workers if they think adaptations will be too costly.
And have you ever gone through the want ads for secretarial work, and see how many job listings say that one of the job requirements is to be able to lift 20 lbs? That kind of thing only started to happen after the ADA went into effect, so that employers wouldn’t even have to consider hiring physically disabled people.
And the only teeth the ADA has in terms of enforcement is giving the disabled individual person the right to sue in court … which, if you’re dealing with disability, and you’re trying to sue because of employment discrimination, is a real catch-22.
If, by that question, you mean: “Who benefits from suppression of Disability Rights?”
The answer is: “Anyone who wants to maintain the status quo to retain their privilege and power in a White Supremacist, Patriarchal, society.”
You see: the rhetoric used to justify and perpetuate exploitation of marginalized people is all rooted in ableist assumptions. The enslavement of Africans in the 18th Century could be justified alongside the Declaration of Independence because Black people were thought to be incapable of acting and thinking like adults (they were intellectually inferior/impaired, the reasoning went). Women were denied the vote because they were considered too frail and emotionally fragile for political life, etc..
If you check out the history of the Unsightly Beggar Ordinances, which made it illegal for people with certain disfiguring disabilities to go out in public, you’ll see that the first ones were put on the books in the United States in 1867 – right after the end of the Civil War, when former enslaved people were now entering the “general population” (and the last of those laws weren’t repealed until 1970).
And then, there’s Aktion T4 – which was Hitler’s program to exterminate the disabled ahead of World War 2 – as a way to experiment with efficient gas chamber technology, and also to test the public’s acceptance of eugenics and genocide.
And this rhetoric will continue to be effective as long as people think of the Disabled as “those people,” the rare exceptions, instead of thinking of the Disabled as “me, someday, if I’m lucky enough to survive long enough.”
*Which almost happened to me, right out of college, except I didn’t take the bait. I have spastic cerebral palsy (with bad balance, can’t keep regular time, and hands that randomly grip things too tightly), and the only job my Vocational Rehabilitation social worker had on offer for me was to work on an assembly line putting raw eggs into egg cartons, at a wage that wouldn’t even cover the special transportation I’d need to get to the factory. Meanwhile, I’d gotten my college degree in writing and communications.
