A lot of things have gotten worse since 2002. This blog is probably one of them.
This is from January 20, 2014, “How the most famous white evangelical with a disability became the public face of the white evangelical campaign against the rights of persons with disabilities“:
The United States has not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities. The United States Senate voted not to do so.
Why not? Well because of Nicolae Carpathia and Agenda 21 and the global conspiracy of the Illuminati and the international Jewish bankers, of course. Which is to say because of a vocal faction of white evangelicals who oppose this convention as part of their fantasy role-playing battle against imaginary monsters.
Leading this charge was a guy named Michael Farris, the founder/CEO/pope of something called the Home School Legal Defense Association. The HSDLA spends most of its time raising funds to fight against any legal oversight for right-wing Bartonian home-schoolers, defending parents’ religious freedom not to let their kids learn reading, writing and arithmetic, or anything like actual science and history. Oh, and defending the parental right to corporal punishment, of course.
Farris tag-teamed with former Sen. Rick Santorum to block ratification of the disabilities convention late in 2012, and they resumed their valiant battle against the rights of persons with disabilities again late in 2013.
So what do the Farristorum and the Hesulda have against people with disabilities? Well, mainly it’s just their fundraising niche. All the really lucrative religious-right direct-mail fundraising markets were already dominated by a few big players or were too saturated to allow room for yet another player trying to collect checks to fight the Gay Menace or the Satanic baby-killers.
So HSDLA had to get creative, claiming that the convention threatens American “sovereignty” and “states rights.”
No, really, “States rights.” They say that. Because I guess when you’ve learned all your history from a home-school curriculum, you don’t realize that “states rights” has always been the last desperate bastion of villains and bastards and that the phrase will be forever associated with treason in defense of slavery and the people who started and lost a civil war then embraced terrorism for a century rather than accepting their military and moral defeat.
“States rights.” OK, then. So these are not good people, but at least they’re not pretending otherwise.
Apart from kicking-down at persons with disabilities, the HSDLA has also been in the news a bit recently due to its close association with something called the Vision Forum — a separate direct-mail fundraising agency promoting a proudly patriarchal form of white Christianity. Vision Forum was like an even creepier version of Bill Gothard’s creepy cult. It imploded late last year when its CEO/founder/pope, a guy named Doug Phillips, was found to have been conducting an affair with a woman young enough that “conducting an affair” seems like a too-polite euphemism for something closer to abuse.
It gets weirder from there, with the anti-disability-rights Vision Forum enlisting Joni Eareckson Tada for a PR stunt that included a corruptly secured (and then rescinded) Academy Award nomination. Read the rest here.
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