The people we're OK with killing

There's a powerful piece of writing by Tommy Christopher on Mediate about a major US network excusing the murder of a disabled child.

People with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) are routinely slandered in the news media, even by parents of autistic children, but nothing comes remotely close to a CBS News report that sickly excuses the murder of 14 year-old Alex Spourdalakis by his mother and an accomplice. The report has spurred a petition to have CBS News take it down, but they really need to air a complete retraction, and discipline everyone involved in this travesty.

On Friday’s CBS This Morning, reporter Sharyl Attkisson delivered a report that was fatally flawed on several levels, but I hesitate to even mention the reporting itself, because even if everything in the report was 100% above-board and true, it would not support the sick conclusion that permeates it: that Alex Spourdalakis’ mother had no choice but to murder him. This sounds like an exaggeration, surely, but it is not. This was the explicit message of CBS News’ report.

The closest anyone in this report comes to denouncing Alex’s murder is anchor Gayle King, who introduces the piece by saying “The case is extreme, but it shines a light on the struggles of hundreds of thousands of families coping with autism.”

Why can so many journalists involved in compiling and presenting this report be so blind? Christopher quotes Ari Ne’eman, President of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network and the first presidential appointee with autism:

"An ideology, a dangerous ideology that preaches that people are better off dead than disabled, is what led to Alex’s murder."

This is hardly just an American problem. Hate crime against the disabled is going up in the UK, aided by, yes, them again, the media. In the UK's case it's a drip-drip of stories about fake benefit claimants, allegedly sourced back to the government.

In another powerful piece for ABC Australia Stella Young details harrowing case after harrowing case of:

Disabled people who have died at the hands of family members, and so often the media uses terms like 'compassionate homicide' or 'mercy killing' to describe the actions. But the killing of a disabled person is not 'compassionate'. It is not 'euthanasia'. It is murder.

In one case a daughter was starved to death.

Angela Puhle pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of manslaughter and was sentenced to a three-year good behaviour bond. Further, the judge described Puhle as "a loving and devoted mother". He said:

"You did all you could over the years to ensure she could live as happy a life as possible for a person with severe disabilities that she suffered from."

She will not serve time in prison.

Consider for a moment the fact that in South Australia where Kyla Puhle died of starvation, the offense of ill treatment of an animal - whether or not that ill treatment results in death - carries a maximum penalty of $50,000 or four years in prison (PDF). Earlier this year Adelaide man Hally French pleaded guilty to bashing a dog with a pole and suspending it from a clothes line. He received a three month prison sentence. The dog subsequently made a full recovery.

Like Christopher, Young makes this point:

While the disability support system may indeed be woefully inadequate to support these parents, it cannot possibly be used to justify murder.

Of course not, but I do wonder if there is not a collective responsibility. A community, neighbours, relatives, who let down those disabled people. Professionals who, like is often reported when a child is neglected and murdered, who saw warning signs but failed to take action?

If we can understand racism or homophobia as being something pervasive, as not limited to 'bad' and 'good' individuals, as not a personalised 'sin', then surely disabalism is also a collective and pervasive issue? That disabalism killed these people?

If these parents were killing their kids because they're gay then we'd understand that the parents are personally responsible but also that the community let them get away with it and allowed that level of hate to fester?

Hugh Ryan wrote a powerful piece last month in the New York Times reviewing a exhibition about the first five years of HIV/Aids in New York. He chronicles how the exhibition whitewashes those institutions, like, but far from limited to, the Catholic Church, who were perfectly happy to watch gays die.

Bad history has consequences. I’m not afraid we will forget AIDS; I am afraid we will remember it and it will mean nothing. If we cannot face the root issue — that we let people die because we did not like them — AIDS will become a blip on our moral radar, and this cycle will repeat every time we connect an unpopular group with something that scares us.

I survived that time and I can well recall: people wanted people like me dead, that's just the truth. It wasn't just individuals, it was something far more rotten.

If murder and ill treatment of the disabled is getting worse that's not about a few bad apples, it's about our collective decision to allow it to happen.

Does Labour want these disabled people jailed?

Ok. First up, I am NOT researching this to death. So you can forget that: FU. I am not descending rabbit-holes and reading endless PDFs about who knows what. But what I do know is that Labour people are suggesting that the people talked about in a Guardian blog post be jailed.

I am not researching to death because I am applying common sense. I don't need to read a lot of academic literature discussing a subject in the abstract. The ideology is in those PDFs and the result is the result -- jail.

The Guardian post is by Tuppy Owens, the legendary campaigner on sexual politics, and it is about disabled people paying for sex. Which is stuff that happens.

There are people in the UK Labour Party who want these people to go to jail. All clients of prostitutes must be punished for their own good and society's betterment, they and their ideology say. They literally claim that these disabled people are committing violence against women. They aren't campaigning for disabled people to be imprisoned but that's precisely where their ideology ends up at.

Those opposing what Owens is describing, the reality she is describing, can talk themselves into a hole, a rabbit hole. The end result, the reality which they have already enacted in much of Scandinavia, which they want in the whole of Europe, would put these disabled people in prison.

They may claim they don't want jail, they just want to 'name and shame'. But what if they aren't ashamed but defiant? They refuse to pay fines?

Oh, and it is people. Owens describes men but disabled women pay for sex too.

This is the reality of the so-called campaign to end prostitution. These Labour people, who think 'Miracle X' policy will 'end this scourge', would put disabled man X (oh, it will likely be a man) in prison.

Is the Labour Party in favour of imprisoning these disabled people?

Dissemble.

Of course I have a further point. This is an extrapolation on something which has annoyed me for a long while.

These feminist arguments on prostitution always ignore male prostitution. If they bother, they try to shovel it into the worst aspects of the female sex trade -- just like Dworkin abysmally did with gay porn -- but it always ends up in the same place that the shoveling of much of the female sex work choice into 'forced trade' has. See the Guardian expose on how independent women choosing sex work all become 'sex slaves' in NGOs eyes.

Let me be blunt. Feminists arguing against sex work don't give a f*** about male sex workers*. I am a gay man and I have seen this again and again -- gay sex workers are collateral damage, if they're considered at all. The laws that result, and impact them, they, feminists, could care less about. Because they impact men. Gay or not, they're still men.

I'm wrong? Show me how I'm wrong. I wish I could think otherwise, 'friend of da gayze' Mary Honeyball MEP. Yes, you. You do give a f***? Where? How? Vera Baird, Harriet Harman, Gavin Shuker -- You too. And don't invent some 'international gay sex slave' racket when what we really mean is some Brazilian guy trying for a better life (and doing it) in London or Berlin.

No one is claiming that it is all 'Belle De Jour' for anyone, including gay prostitutes. But it ain't all sex slavery either and there are plenty of workers yelling at you otherwise. Gay ones you rarely hear from because the nice gays fit to drink tea in the parlor don't tend to stick up for them.

So, will you jail the disabled?

You invent ideological laws to meld society? How f****ing far are you prepared to go?

The very idea of jailing the disabled strikes at the ideology behind the 'Nordic model' laws proposed by Labour MPs, and which mostly male MPs might be too shit scared of ideological error to do anything but go along with. That's why I'm asking the question. This isn't rhetorical, because it may well happen. It nearly happened before in the UK and it's being pushed in Scotland and Wales.

There are very likely some LibDems, Greens, Nationalists and Tories who would go along with it too, but I'm talking about those Labour people who are driven to make this nightmare come true.

We have clear examples of real world decriminalisation of prostitution that works petty well. Much as we have of examples of decriminalisation of 'soft' drugs. Yet -- zoinks -- we, Labour, can't do that because, either, ideology is telling us not to or -- zoinks -- politics (DMail fear etc) is screaming no. So we end up on the verge of jailing the disabled.

Q: How about 'harm reduction'? Something which has a very long and established pedigree?

A: Can't have that, we read this PDF and spoke to some Swedes and our advanced Europa learning tells us otherwise.

Q: Sending disabled people who use sex workers to jail isn't really 'harm reduction', is it?

A: How dare you suggest we are proposing that and would you please shut up with your promotion of male violence. Are you a misogynist? I think we need a new hate speech law ...

Social democracy has a choice here and, in Europe at least, I can guess where we're going ... Europarliament debates on necessary jail disability modifications anyone? ...Who is telling the likes of Mary Honeyball where to get off? Who would dare?

* This is a rant. I do actually know that some feminists acknowledge male sex work.