Writing in the Washington Post, former poster child Ben Mattlin repudiates the Jerry Lewis telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

[The telethon features] nondisabled celebrities onstage raising money for disabled kids, who are mostly offstage. I know the purpose of the telethon is to raise money, and that people won’t tune in unless there are performers they want to see. Nevertheless, can you imagine an NAACP fundraiser hosted exclusively by white people?

If you are not disabled, you may think this is a relatively minor issue. But it matters.

… When most people see those of us with severe, progressive neurological conditions, they want to help, and I am not ungrateful. The desire to cure is probably human nature. And MDA’s main mission is to be a medical charity; it claims to spend 77 cents of every dollar it raises on services, an admirable percentage, and finances hundreds of clinics and medical researchers.

Still, for the past 30 years, the message of the disability-rights movement has been as consistent as it is simple: We’re fine as we are. We don’t need fixing. We need access. We need respect. We need work. In other words, we need the same things everybody else does.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 11:08 am and is filed under muscular dystrophy, personal stories, philanthropy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post