Hilzoy takes the high road:
I’ve always thought that a good citizenry is also composed of people who assume, until proven wrong, that many of the people who disagree with them are acting in good faith.
This matters for policy: you’re unlikely to choose sound policies if you assume that anyone who disagrees with you is a depraved, corrupt imbecile. It’s hard to learn anything from people you have completely written off. But it’s also corrosive to any kind of community or dialogue to assume the worst about large numbers of people you’ve never met. It makes you less willing to try to take their problems seriously, and to try to figure out how they might be solved, or to try to understand what’s driving them.
In that spirit I'd like to respond to the pernicious nonsense article Politico published yesterday about how "the left" hates people with disabilities and wants to exterminate them:
A year ago, Palin gave birth to her youngest son, Trig, who has Down syndrome. Since then, mother and son have become objects of the left’s unrelenting scorn and the right’s unflinching fidelity.
An underexamined reason why Palin is loved and loathed so fiercely is her intimate association with two of our most divisive issues: disability and the right to life.
In her resignation statement, Palin suggested her decision was due in part to her family’s reaction to personal attacks against Trig.
According to the authors, reaction from "the left" to Sarah Palin and the fact that she carried to term a disabled child has "eugenic overtones."
They quote a couple of blog posts (no links of course) that mock her for exploiting her child for political gain and one from a libertarian who is supposedly "troubled" by Trig’s existence because "it is crucial to reaffirm the morality of aborting a fetus diagnosed with Down syndrome." This apparently is supposed to prove that "the left" has an "anti-disability bias."
Now this next part just makes me want to pull my hair out. The authors conflate some very good points about the disabled with utterly wrong rationalizations about why most Americans have rejected Sarah Palin and why they dislike how she's exploited her family and especially her disabled son:
Palin is controversial, in part, because America is divided over disability. We’ve established laws and institutions that protect people with disabilities. But we also do everything we can to make sure they don’t see the light of day.
Trig is a reminder of our fierce ambivalence over disability. Every mention of his name is a pinprick to our conscience. Every photo of mother and son is a reminder of concepts — vulnerability, dependency and suffering — our culture no longer tolerates, as well as virtues, such as humility, dignity and self-sacrifice, it no longer extols.
Trig is also a reminder of an inescapable truth: Disability is an inherent part of the human condition. At a time of deep cultural divisions, 1-year-old Trig Palin represents the deepest division of all, between a culture that increasingly sees genetic perfection as an entitlement and a culture still rooted in the belief that human beings are defined not by their capabilities but, instead, by the very fact of their humanity.
In the spirit of what Hilzoy suggests, I'll try to assume the authors of this piece of tripe are not being disingenous propagandists and instead really don't understand the position of those who disagree with them about abortion. I'll try to set the record straight for them.
Abortion is about choice. It's a question of whether you as a woman choose to bear a child. The alternative is someone else choosing whether you're going to bear that child or not. It's that simple.
Whatever I think of Sarah Palin, I certainly don't fault her for choosing to give birth to a disabled child. In fact, I think more highly of her for sticking to her personal and religious principles and making that difficult choice.
But the point is, she made a choice. She and her party want to make sure women don't have a choice. They want to make that decision for all women. They want Sarah Palin's decision to be the only decision allowed. They think they know the absolutes of what's right and what's wrong, and they want to impose them on everyone. That's what "the left" rejects. That's what divides America, not Trig Palin.
In fact, this is what more accurately represents a liberal view of disability, imo (video here). It's a belief that we are not all the same, that people must be free to find their own way, and that when they're allowed to their true potential can flower.