Quick Note: It's a Disability?
I’m sure many of you have already seen this story over at Witchvox, but I just couldn’t help but mention the case of a woman in a “energy healing” program at Langara College in Vancouver that claimed she was kicked out for being a Wiccan. However, the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal thought otherwise, and rejected her complaint. After reading the two journalistic accounts of the events leading up to the tribunal, it seems pretty clear that Sally Wild isn’t fully in touch with reality. Moreover, she makes a startling claim to “disability” status.
“She later elaborated as part of her complaint that she was mistreated because of her hereditary gifts of intuitive power and perception … she suffers from a disability that her lawyer described as ‘extraordinary gifts of intuition and perception that require significant accommodation.’”
Now I’ve seen plenty of flamboyant Pagans in my day play up their psychic sensitivity, but I can’t seem to remember any of them actually trying to have their “gifts” classified as a disability that required “significant accommodation”. That’s a new one on me. You can read the whole complaint, conclusions, and decision of the tribunal, here, and decide for yourself if that case had any real merit to it.
There is one related point I’d like to make about all this fuss, and that is why two major news organizations thought it was even worth covering. Any in-depth reading of the case seems to point to this being rather frivolous, an opinion the tribunal reached when looking at the evidence, so why the coverage? Surely there were other rulings by the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal that were more newsworthy? The answer I fear is that journalists were looking for a juicy story full of Witches and wacky goings-on and found one. While I can understand that impulse, it isn’t good journalism. All these stories have done is call attention to a young woman with some issues, issues that will be that much harder to deal with and put behind her now that she’s been accorded her 15 minutes of journalistic infamy.
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