Trouble Is Everywhere

This is from last year:

Olivia Chow: Today, on December 6, we remember the tragic massacre of 14 young women in Montreal, 22 years ago. One lone gunman with a lethal weapon could not contain his anger against women. Canadians mourned and vowed to work for change.

Jack Layton and others spoke out against men's violence against women, and co-founded the White Ribbon campaign, now supported by millions in 55 countries.

They, and families of the 14 young women fought for gun control. Marc Lepine's weapon is listed on the long gun registry, which the conservatives now tragically aim to destroy.

This government should strengthen gun control rather than eliminating it -- so we can all stand in this House on December 6 and say — Never Again.

Aujourd'hui, six décembre, levons-nous tous debout et disons d'une seule voix : plus jamais!

So this is a thing that happened.

Sign Language Ban Imposed on N.J. Girl

School officials have threatened a hearing-impaired girl with suspension if she uses sign language to talk to her friends on the school bus, the girl's parents say.

Danica Lesko and her parents say sign language is the only way to for the 12-year-old to communicate, especially while riding to school on a noisy bus.

But officials at Stonybrook School — which is not a school for the hearing-impaired — and district officials in Branchburg, N.J., apparently believe signing is a safety hazard. They have sent a letter to the Lesko family ordering Danica to stop using sign language on the school bus or risk a three-day suspension.

...

"The Board is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to all students with disabilities, and is satisfied that there has been no violation of that policy in this case," officials said in the statement. "The Board is also committed to assuring the safety of all students who travel on District buses, and will continue to take appropriate steps to accomplish that goal."

LET'S PLAY A FUN GAME.

How do you think Sign Language is a SAFETY HAZARD?

I'm sorry this image is so small. It's an image from the new Google video that explains their plans for how to change your privacy policies! it's not subtitled, despite Google's recent commitment to totally being accessible to people with disabilities. Thus I turned on YouTube's AutoCaption.

The video says:
With fewer words, simpler explanations, and less legal gloop to wade through.

The captions provide:
With fewer words simpler explanations and leslie copeland tweeter.

Supreme Court Affirms Right of Religious Organisations to Foster Bigotry by Andrea at This Ain't Livin'

For SCOTUS to uphold the right of a religious organization to fire someone merely because they have a disability, not because they performed their duties poorly but merely because the non-disabled employers were uncomfortable and scared about that person’s disability is shameful and appalling. Confirming the right of religious organizations to discriminate on grounds that have nothing to do with religion is morally reprehensible. Even more repulsively, every major religion in the US, every major Christian denomination (and quite a few minor) filed amicus briefs in favor of their right to discriminate. Only one Sikh organization filed an amicus brief, along with a stellar line-up of civil rights organizations, humanists, and atheists, arguing that religious organizations do not need a legal right to discriminate against people.

Meanwhile, religious organizations including churches will continue to discriminate. They will continue to refuse to make their houses of worship accessible, and now they can easily refuse to even consider hiring someone who is disabled, and if an employee becomes disabled, they may claim that person is a minister and terminate their employment to avoid paying health insurance or disability insurance costs.

Seriously? SERIOUSLY?

I'm doing some circle maintenance and removing access from folks I haven't interacted with in the better part of a year. If this is an oversight on my part (clicky boxes are hard!) please let me know! (Comments are screened)

I know a lot of people skip titles of posts. Please read the title of this one.

I had an argument with someone at school on Thursday and it's still sitting with me. I think this is because we'd had an earlier argument on a similar subject on Tuesday. As you can probably imagine, it was about disability, or more specifically, about how disabled people have existed and advocated for themselves since long before the mainstream folks started paying attention, and well before I ever started paying attention.

The argument on Thursday was about my colleague's disagreement with the abstract for a master's research paper on disability discrimination in the Montreal Metro System. I'm not from Montreal, so the place this system has in Montreal was a bit much for me to grasp. Apparently it's a big thing, a progress thing. A thing about how Montreal has been advancing into the future. When it was opened in 1966, it was opened to everyone.

Everyone, of course, except people who can't walk up and down stairs.

The presentation and follow-up short video talked explicitly about ableist constructions of public spaces. She called it out very bluntly: this is discriminatory. This has always been discriminatory.

The part that others tend not to get, the part my colleague at the university didn't get, is that the people at the time knew this.

This is one of the things about disability-based discrimination that drives me up the wall. The theory that many people express is that no one in the past could possibly have been expected to think about disability as a category because this whole disability rights thing didn't start until [the speaker learned of it, whatever time period that is] and obviously not a moment before. (See: many feminist responses to disability-based critiques online that ignore even something as simple as the presence of disability activists at the Beijing conference in 1995. I've been told again and again and again that disability only became a "thing" to consider in the past few years and it's mostly "oversensitive" types at that. Arg.)

So, let me lay some facts on you:

The late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Metro was being built to be inaccessible to many people with physical disabilities, was also the time when people with disabilities were getting out of unwanted institutional settings. It's called "The Great Exit," and I'm pretty sure you haven't learned of it. The Great Exit didn't happen spontaneously, and it wasn't an austerity measure. People with disabilities campaigned for it. They fought for it. Just like they fought for employment and education in the 1800s and early 1900s in Nova Scotia.

Once they left institutions, people with disabilities fought for employment rights and to live free from discrimination. To some extent, they won. The Quebec Human Rights Act included disability as a protected class, passed in 1975.

Except for transit users. Explicitly, transit was not included, you could not sue for a human rights violation for not being allowed on a bus if you were disabled.

In 1988, ADAPT (a US-based protest group) came to Montreal to highlight how inaccessible the transit system was. This PDF has some of their information [in English] about the protest. It was all over the news, and people were arrested for crashing through barricades with their wheelchairs.

And still, the Metro remained inaccessible. In fact, it wasn't until 2004 - Sixteen Years Later - that the law saying that you couldn't sue for inaccessible transit was struck down, and it wasn't until 2006 that a Metro station was made wheelchair accessible. And even then, it was a debate, and one that apparently was won because it "looked bad" that the Metro was still inaccessible. Not that it was bad, that it looked bad.

The Metro in Montreal is currently being retrofitted to be accessible. The current rate is less than one transit station becoming accessible per year. Again, The Montreal Metro System will be fully wheelchair accessible in 2058.

My colleague argued that it is wrong ("presentist," the worst thing to accuse an historian of being within the discipline) to chide people in the past for not thinking of people with disabilities when they made the Metro. "They didn't know better then. We know better now."

This is a lie. They knew. Disability-based historians and disability rights activists know how far back the fight for equal access goes. It didn't spring, fully formed from the head of Hephaestus, in 1995 in Beijing. It didn't suddenly arrive the day you first learned of it. It's always been here. In ignoring that, in assuming that his ignorance is in fact the truth, my colleague (and many others like him) are betraying their own attitudes about disability, about history, and about what matters.

Don will be 78 years old when he can physically get into every Metro station in Montreal. The lifespan of people with Don's disability is less than that.

It's Vote Day, Vote Day, Everyone Get Out to Vote Today!
Everybody's looking forward to the results!
It's Vote Day! Vote Day! Get Outside and Vote Today!
Everybody's looking forward to the results!

Parties and parties and parties and yay!
parties and parties and parties and yay!
Looking forward to the election.....

According to a letter I just received from the TTC, buses are not to be put in service if their ramps aren't working. Drivers are to do an inspection of their buses before their shift, including the ramps, and if the ramps aren't working, they're not supposed to drive them.

Okay then.

Completely non-poll-technology Poll:

Do you believe this?

Yes, of course!
No, of course not!
I'm sure it's the policy, but not put into practice.

So, that's what's going on there.

Things are so busy here I hardly have time to breath.