| THE LONG & SORRY HISTORY OF DISCRIMINATION AGAINST PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES IN THE UNITED STATES -- AND ITS LIKELY CAUSES |
| (September 30, 2000) (editor's note: NEVER underestimate the power that Moebius has with regard to one's family or acquaintances. Read on and you will find the name of Martha Minow, professor of law at Harvard University. Her uncle, Burt Minow, had Moebius syndrome....) |
| FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact Mary Johnson, Editor, Ragged Edge magazine, at [email protected] The Supreme Court case University of Alabama V. Garrett will be heard Oct. 11, on whether Titles I and II of the Americans with Disabilities Act are "a proper exercises of Congress's power under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment." Disabled people have endured a history of state enforced segregation and discrimination. Every state in the country passed laws that singled out people with mental or physical disabilities for institutionalization. Virtually every state has excluded children with disabilities from public education, even when state constitutions required all children to attend school. Every state has had specific constitutional provisions, statutes, or case law that kept people with cognitive or emotional disabilities from voting. "The long & sorry history of discrimination against people with disabilities in the United States -- and its likely causes," from our September issue, is now online at http://www.raggededgemagazine.com/garrett/ and details the discrimination stories that led Congress to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Alabama says that "Congress did not show, or even try to show, that the states have previously violated the constitutional rights of the disabled." That's wrong. Congress held 13 hearings on the bill; a Congressionally- designated Task Force held 63 public forums across the country, which were attended by more than 7,000 individuals, and got letters from nearly 5,000 individuals documenting the problems with discrimination faced daily by persons with disabilities -- often at the hands of state and local governments. Yet while the widespread state-sanctioned discrimination against blacks was general public knowledge when the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964; similar attention has never been drawn to the kind of discrimination, or the massive extent of it, that led Congress to pass the ADA. Persons with disabilities "have been victims of intentional and irrational state-sponsored discrimination and exclusion from the basic rights and citizenship in every aspect of public and private life, including employment, housing, the judicial system, marriage, parenting, and education," say Harvard professors Morton Horwitz, Martha Field, Martha Minow; New York University's Derrick Bell and Ohio State University's Ruth Colker -- just five of the more than 100 historians and scholars who detail the discrimination in a friend-of-the court brief. Read about the discrimination, its causes, and find links to amicus briefs at http://www.raggededgemagazine.com/garrett/ |