Let's Talk: The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

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From my friend, Alice: "When reading Tea Party's outlandish arguments against the #CRPD and against supporting children with disabilities at home and abroad, I am reminded of the following line by famous philosopher… "I don’t doubt your sincerity, I just think that you are hallucinating." – Richard Dawkins

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It's all over facebook. Maybe you've seen it, maybe you haven't, but some (right wingers) have the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) down as a kind of conspiracy theory. Select parents of kids with disabilities are online, begging other parents to call in to their representative and have this Treaty left unratified.

This just makes my blood boil.

It's every kind of insanely stupid.

Have these parents been reading the Treaty?

Have they been checking out the facts of the Treaty and what it stands for with legal experts who understand the ADA?

Have they been asking any and all questions they might have to the people that actually know a thing or two about this?

No, no, and no.

And frankly, I'm pretty sick of this crap. A parent has a kid with a disability – especially an intellectually disability – and all of the sudden, they are some expert on the ADA, knowing more, supposedly, than the very people who crafted the ADA. More than the very people who camped out for Section 504, more than those that called the Independent Living Movement into action.

Right, because Judy Heumann doesn't know what she's doing. The hundreds of disability rights organizations that are pulling for this Treaty don't know anything, either. The only people that know anything in any of this are narrow minded little people like Santorum who spread lies that ultimately will hurt the international community of those with disabilities more than they know.

And if you are following this – if you are following them – you are so heartstoppingly, glaringly wrong, my heart hurts for you.

But it hurts more for the people that this Treaty will help – would help – more than anything.

Want to argue about it? Read it first: Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Have questions? Ask Judy. Or DREDF.

But don't go talking smack about something you were never involved with – and knew nothing of – until Santorum or his cronies brought it to your attention. Don't go shooting down something that would so radically change the lives of so many who need it, something that would do nothing to change the ADA here in US, something that is nothing to be afraid of and everything to support.

 

 

 

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