The House Voted to Dismantle the ADA and the Disabled Are Screwed
“If you actually cared about your child we wouldn’t be in this situation. He is your fault.”
Patty belittled me in the living room of her home the day she kicked Charlie out of her daycare program. The act in itself was discrimination. Charlie being the only autistic child in her care was proving to be more difficult to accommodate than she had initially thought, despite her assurances that she was an expert in managing children with special needs.
It was obvious. She had spent the last two weeks complaining about Charlie’s behavior non-stop when I would come to pick him up. She would do it right in front of him. “He’s too much trouble” she said when he made too many verbal stims. “He’s a danger to the other children” she said when Charlie threw a toy he didn’t want to give away. “He’s just too much work for my staff”.
Charlie was 3 years old at the time. By no means the only child in the program who was loud, obnoxious, or threw things when he was angry. But it was on this occasion that she had found a grave violation of our contract so egregious that she could no longer handle the burden of caring for him.
“He’s been having a sore throat the last couple days so I gave him a little Tylenol” is what caused it. I had, in her words, drugged our child, putting him in serious danger and it was not up to her to have to monitor his well-being should he now overdose and die. “He could fall unconscious and not wake up” was how she described the dose of Acetaminophen I had given him, which was both below the recommended dose and also not heroin.
What people don’t realize about disability discrimination is that it’s not obvious. Often it’s done in very overt ways. Since Patty first kicked Charlie out of her program 2 years ago he’s been expelled from a number of other programs and after-school activities in the same fashion.
It often follows the same pattern. We enroll, disclosing that he’s autistic and describe in detail what that means. The provider tells us they have no issue with it. “We welcome ALL kids here!” they say. Then in the following weeks they start to complain. The complaints begin here and there. Charlie was loud. Charlie was quiet. Charlie doesn’t like to sit. Charlie sits too much. But they eventually become the bedrock of all of our communication with the provider. They reach a crescendo around the time that some new arbitrary rule is implemented in the program which Charlie cannot comply with. It’s at that point that Charlie doesn’t get kicked out, we have to withdraw him because we know they’ve established a requirement that he can’t complete.
Even in the instances in which we do find a way to comply, the rules are usually altered to make it more difficult. If Charlie requires some assistance using the restroom, an aid must be provided to help the staff. We provide an aid. Guess what? Adults aren’t allowed to accompany children into the restroom. New rule.
We have never thought to seek any legal action but would be well within our rights under the current Americans with Disabilities Act. A program that doesn’t want to accommodate our child isn’t one we want him enrolled in. But Charlie has many privileges that other children who have special needs don’t have with our workplace flexibility. When you experience the kind of soft discrimination that exists throughout our very streamlined, able-driven culture you understand how utterly screwed somebody is if they’re facing limitations and how the inability to pursue legal action prohibits any possibility of receiving accommodation.
Worse, it eliminates the need for dialogue about how best to achieve those accommodations in a manner that examines the cost-benefit of implementing such changes. While the threat of litigation can be a vulgar method for some to gain from others, its very existence requires that businesses at least think about the cost of complying with the law vs. the risk of litigation as manner of mitigating risk rather than some arbitrary moral obligation.
The House voted this week to essentially eliminate the core of what makes the ADA work in providing access to people with disabilities and special needs. It’s worth noting that not a single group who represents this community was in favor of this legislation. And while I expect this kind of callous worldview from the GOP, the Democrat votes are shameful and deserve special recognition. They are:
Representatives Aguilar, Bera, Cooper, Correa, Cuellar, Foster, Peters, Peterson, Rice, Schrader, Speier, and Torres.
To their credit, here are the GOP congressional reps who showed more decency than their Democrat counterparts:
Barletta, Comstock, Costello, Diaz-Balart, Fitzpatrick, Fortenberry, Frelinghuysen, Harper, Katko, Lance, McMorris Rodgers, Reichert, Roskam, Sensenbrenner, Smith (NJ, no relation), Thompson (PA), Yoder, Young
