(Note – I’m still trying to process the briefs in the Pennsylvania Hockenberry case. No word on the oral arguments yet. I’m hoping for some reports and/or press coverage by tomorrow.)
Last week, I was alerted about a blog entry on the HBO biopic You Don’t Know Jack that was published on the site of Ms. Magazine. Like most of the bloggers who have reviewed this film, Carol King is a big fan of the movie and of Kevorkian himself. In Kevorkian and the Right to Choose, King explains her close connection to the Kevorkian saga – she was the executive director of the Michigan Abortion Rights Action League, which was right across the street from the office building of Geoffrey Fieger, Kevorkian’s attorney.
In a ringing endorsement of Kevorkian’s career, she carefully steps around any mention of Kevorkian’s “assistance” in the suicides of non-terminally ill individuals, which were in fact more typical of the people whose lives he helped end. She also appears to be totally ignorant about the 30 years prior to Kevorkian’s suicide assistance spree – in which he passionately advocated for the establishment of the specialty of “medicide” – a specialty in medicine that would involve killing patients – death row prisoners, people with dementia, disabled infants, etc. – in a way that they could also be exploited for live human experimentation and organ harvesting. See this post for more information.
Given her role as the director of an organization that advocates for abortion rights, it’s probably not surprising that she draws a straight and simplistic line in her entry – a line between assisted suicide and abortion. (This is, of course, the same line that prolifers like to draw – it seems to be an area of agreement between euthanasia proponents and Christian prolifers.).
But King pulled something that evoked a response that neither she nor her editors at the magazine anticipated. She wrote the following:
“The “right-to-lifers” enlisted the disabled in their cause when they cautioned that allowing people to choose to die would soon become their “duty to die.” They used the same rhetoric during the recent health-care reform debate when they conjured up fears about Obama’s “death panels.” This fear-mongering is adapted to the abortion issue when claims are made that women blithely abort “imperfect” fetuses.”
This brought an unexpected shitstorm of anger from feminist disability activists, some of whom don’t even oppose assisted suicide, but were and are enraged by the automatic marginalization of people with disabilities by the use of the term “the disabled” and the suggestion that we’re pawns of the Christian Right.
The quote above is no longer on the blog. After several days of angry complaints from feminist disability activists, Ms. editor Michele Kort wrote the following:
Both the writer and the editors of the Ms. blog would like to apologize for using the expression “the disabled” rather than “people with disabilities” in this post. It was careless on our parts not to catch both the inaccuracy and the offensiveness of that term. Also, the post has been edited to reflect that the right wing TRIED to enlist people with disabilities in their campaign; quite obviously, people with disabilities have the agency to refuse such overtures.
There are a number of problems with the edit: First of all, the new version gives the impression to uninformed readers that there wasn’t any disability opposition to Kevorkian at all. Real respect would entail an acknowledgment of that opposition and the distinctiveness of our bases for opposition – as opposed to Christian pro-life groups. It seems that people who like to think of themselves as “progressive” have only two ways of dealing with disability activists opposing assisted suicide and euthanasia: Label us “tools” of the religious right – or just pretend that we don’t exist, we were never there, we don’t count.
I also find it interesting – and telling – that Carol King herself didn’t deliver the apology. In fact, she hasn’t entered a comment or reply to this blog entry at all. It’s interesting because if you check the link to her name, you can view other recent blog entries by her – she’s likes to engage with people who comment on her blog entries – but now I see it’s only if they are praising her.
I recommend people reading the blog entry and the comments entered by disability activists. After that, I want to recommend a few other blogs that weighed in on this way before I did:
- I believe that Knitting Clio was the first one to take this blog entry on in “Blogging Against Disabilism, Part II;”
- Lauredhel says it’s “time to push back against this fuckery” in “The Disabled” are pawns of the right wing, sez Ms Magazine;
- and Anna posted “An Open Letter to Ms Magazine Blog” at FORWARD – FWD (feminists with disabilities) for a way forward.
Just to reiterate one point made above. A number of feminists with disabilities have taken Carol King to task on and off her blog. She could at least show them the respect of replying to them directly instead of leaving it to her editor to do something she probably finds distasteful to have to do herself. –Stephen Drake