By Karen Meyer on WLS-TV, Chicago (ABC affiliate), with video:

Correspondent Karen Meyer interviews people with disabilities and disability rights advocates who are offended by the use of the word “retard” in the film “Tropic Thunder.”

Meyer, who is deaf, speaks and signs simultaneously while the text of her words is spelled out across the screen in close-captioning. “Whether it’s language or action, negative portrayals of people with disabilities often opens doors to prejudice and abuse,” she says.

She uses her own voice to narrate the piece, and includes footage and interviews of people with disabilities. Here’s what people were saying:

“Words are very powerful and your words form attitudes, beliefs, values that turn into actions. People who might watch this movie might say, well people who are retards, I don’t want them working in my company, I don’t want them living in my neighborhood I don’t want them participating in my schools next to my child.”

— Jon Voit,  president and CEO of Seguin Services, a not-for-profit serving people with developmental disabilities.

“When I’ve seen the movie I did not like how they put us down. It was the very vulgarest movie I’ve ever seen. The language and how they made fun of handicapped people.”

— Glenora Mills, a woman with a developmental disability

From the [UK] Guardian, a special issue on the culture of deafness.

Among the featured articles:

I wouldn’t have minded if my baby had been born deaf, but the embryology bill suggests I should –  Rebecca Atkinson says the embryology bill currently before the House of Commons curtails the rights of deaf parents. The bill would prohibit the implantation of an embryo known to have deafness when other hearing ones are present. An excerpt:

… This is not about tweaking the genes of a hearing embryo, a technical impossibility. It’s about laying two potential children in embryonic form side by side and affording more right to life to the hearing one by making it illegal to issue preference to the deaf one … this is not about creating a hearing child and then making it deaf. It’s about not being able to give life and therefore equality to an embryo that is already deaf.

…as a deaf person I can’t help but feel slightly affronted that the bill affords more right to life to you the hearing reader, than me the deaf writer, were we to be lying side by side in embryonic form in a petri dish. Indeed, it makes it illegal to choose me over you.

(more…)

In Washingtonpost.com, Marc Fisher disagrees with a federal judge’s ruling that the Washington Redskins must post on the team’s scoreboard the lyrics of any songs played over loudspeakers during games. An excerpt:

… most non-existent of all in this case is any common sense, any attempt to be reasonable. Handicapped people should expect to be able to gain access to public places and activities without undue hardship. And it’s fair to ask a rich company like the Redskins to invest in some technology to make the game equally understandable to deaf fans — which the team has done for several years now.

But no matter what the law might say or how any narrowminded judge might rule, neither legal verbiage nor wishing it will make all people identical. In any public performance, some people will get more of what’s going on and some will get less. Many blind people love going to baseball games; they wouldn’t expect the team to have to hire a guide to sit with them and narrate the action to them.

Blind aide raises bar of expectations — The Hill (blindness)

Disabled parking placard use is on the rise — LA Daily News (law)

Report: Disabled voters face difficulty in RI — Boston Globe (voting)

Op-ed: Those with developmental disabilities need help now — Denver Post (law, politics, intellectual disabilities)

Film of Norfolk man’s life added to Library of Congress — The [Norfolk] Virginian-Pilot (Down syndrome)

Aging parents plan for future of children who still need help — Ottawa Citizen (caretakers)

Extreme Makeover: Emotional buildup – New York Times (disabilities, media, chronic illness, entertainment, television)

He’s immobile, but his story has the power to move — Today Show (muscular dystrophy, media, parents, personal stories)

Op-ed: New ADA rules overturn common sense — Miami Herald (ADA)

Disabled band scores film first — BBC News (entertainment)

Man accused of harassing autistic boy faces hate-crime charge — The Seattle Times (autism, hate crime)

Book review: ‘Deaf Sentence’ — New York Times (deafness)

Redskins ordered to provide hearing-impaired fans ‘aural content’ in stadium — ESPN (deaf/hard of hearing, law)

Redskins ordered to continue captions — Washington Post (deaf/hard of hearing, law)

From the New York Times:

Edward S. Klima (left), an eminent linguist who was one of the first scholars to pay serious attention to sign languages, and in so doing helped them win long-denied recognition as languages in their own right, died on Sept. 25 in the La Jolla section of San Diego.

… At his death, Dr. Klima was emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. He was also an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego and the associate director of the institute’s laboratory for cognitive neuroscience.

Much of Dr. Klima’s work was done in collaboration with his wife, Ursula Bellugi, a professor at Salk and the laboratory’s longtime director. They were known in particular for their long, painstaking unraveling of the grammatical structure of American Sign Language, and for using what they found to illuminate the workings of all language, signed and spoken, in the brain.

… Their work is widely credited with helping American Sign Language gain broader acceptance as a language of instruction for deaf people and, by extension, with helping kindle the Deaf Pride movement, which began in the late 1980s.

(University of California photo from the New York Times)

From the Washington Post:

A planned four-acre development at Gallaudet University represents a dramatic shift in philosophy at the nation’s only institution of higher learning for deaf students. For the first time in its 144-year history, the school is designing buildings and streetscape with the express purpose of bringing together deaf and hearing people.

Officials say the changes at the campus in Northeast Washington are driven by cultural shifts, as a younger generation of students desires more integration into the broader world. Historically, the school’s separation was prompted by public stigma against deaf people, and a corresponding belief that they were better off immersing themselves in their own culture.

“It would create a connection to the city and tear down the walls,” said Hansel Bauman (above left), an architect retained by Gallaudet to help design the project. “It’s a sea change in thinking.”

Gallaudet drew national attention two years ago, when students shut down the campus to demonstrate against the selection of a new president.

(Photo: Hansel Bauman and Fred Weiner, Gallaudet’s executive director for preogram development. From the Washington Post )

Reviewed by Sylvia Brownrigg in the Los Angeles Times. David Lodge’s “funny and touching new novel”  documents a linguistics professor’s journey into hearing loss, mixing comedy with very real grief.

The novel is structured as the diary of Desmond Bates, who brings the reader along as he attempts to understand his changed circumstances. For such an intelligent and sociable man, the loss of his hearing is both comic and humiliating. Eventually the reader comes to understand …

that “Deaf Sentence” is, as its punning title suggests, primarily a sustained reflection on death and life, and the mini-death that is encroaching deafness … There is deaf in life, as Desmond might say, and life in deaf, and this touching, humane novel richly explores the meeting between the two.