In the wake of the initial hulaballo surrounding Michael J. Fox’s television ad in support of stem cell research, a conservative friend (yes, I actually have a couple) repeated the Limbaugh line about how Fox had deliberately refrained from taking his meds to appear more impaired. I reacted much more strongly than I typically do when I have a political disagreement with someone. I think it’s the implications raised in the statements of Limbaugh and his ilk on this issue. They want to have it both ways: Fox is a victim of his condition and being exploited by others as well as someone who is using his condition as a means to get what he wants. <\/p>\n
This is the duality that conservatives possess in their regard of people with disabilities (when they think about us at all). We’re either pitiable victims (this got a lot of play during the Schiavo fracas) or we’re uppity cripples who are being just a little too in-your-face with our gimpiness to get “special treatment” (especially when “special treatment” involves civil rights or access to health care). Since conservatives seem to have some sort of aversion to simply arguing with a person with a disability on the merits of the issue (maybe because they’re afraid we’ll start crying or something–I don’t know), they resort to characterizing them as victims or manipulators. <\/p>\n
I thought Fox’s response to Limbaugh’s attack was elegantly plainspoken<\/a>, making it clear he is neither. But Rush and his followers will continue to believe otherwise for no other reason than because they can’t conceive of an effective political message that doesn’t rely on victimization or manipulation. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the wake of the initial hulaballo surrounding Michael J. Fox’s television ad in support of stem cell research, a conservative friend (yes, I actually have a couple) repeated the Limbaugh line about how Fox had deliberately refrained from taking his meds to appear more impaired. I reacted much more strongly than I typically do […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-mk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1384\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}