From the Montgomery [AL] Advertiser, CBS42-TV in Birmingham, Tuscaloosa [AL] News, Birmingham [AL] News:

John Mark Stallings, 46, the son of former University of Alabama head football coach Gene Stallings and a popular member of the Crimson Tide family, died this morning in Texas.

John Mark Stallings, who had Down syndrome, had been in declining health in recent years as a result of a congenital heart problem. He accompanied his father to every practice and game during his father’s tenure in 1990-96. The Alabama athletic training facility is named in his honor.

His story was told by his father in the book “Another Season.”

“I had a whole lot less tolerance for the gifted and a whole lot more tolerance for the guy that wasn’t quite as gifted,” Gene Stallings told a reporter in January of 2008.  “With Johnny, I saw him struggle to walk, struggle to kick a ball, struggle to do everything that he did. So, I had a little tolerance for the guys that had to struggle.

“If you had talent and didn’t lay it on the line, I didn’t have much tolerance for you.  The less talented guy can’t play on Saturdays. But he can get you ready to play on Saturdays. I wanted the guys who played on Saturday to have an appreciation for that guy who got them there.”

(Photo from the Birmingham News)

Christine Rosen, writing in the Wall Street Journal, memorializes Harriet McBryde Johnson as someone who made society look at disability as a natural part of the human experience. Johnson, she says, demonstrated that disability transcends the convenient categories that often stymie political discourse: secular or religious, liberal or conservative. Johnson held up a mirror to a society whose acceptance of disability wanes as its scientific powers to eliminate disability grow.

As an example, Rosen cites the “rapid near-disappearance of people with Down syndrome.”

As a culture, we have made what Amy Laura Hall of Duke University Divinity School calls a “democratic calculus of worth” regarding Down Syndrome. And that calculus has resulted in a society hostile to people who refuse to make the culturally acceptable choice of ridding themselves of a disabled child before she is born.

… if choice and prevention produce a culture that equates disability with irresponsible parenting decisions, then the homage we pay to accommodation will prove hollow indeed. And as the population ages, and more Americans find themselves living with disabilities, questions about worth at the end of life will become even more pressing. Thanks to people such as Harriet Johnson, we have not yet reached the point where accommodation has given way to neglect or elimination. But we would do well to respect what Ms. Johnson’s own life so ably demonstrated: People with disabilities, she said, “have something the world needs.”

Christine Rosen is senior editor of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society, and the author of Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement.

From The Vancouver Sun:

William Vince, producer of the Oscar-winning film Capote, died on Saturday of cancer at the age of 44.

Among other accomplishments, Vince was remembered for learning to adapt to severe dyslexia. Although he never graduated from high school, he learned to read and write with the help of his mother and a private tutor.

Vince often credited his dyslexia for having developed in him a finely tuned sense of intuition and discipline. His brother, Robert, said Vince’s severe dyslexia gave him a strong sense of compassion for people facing adversity.

From the Los Angeles Times, New York Times:

Bert Shepard, who pitched for the 1945 Washington Senators, has died in California at the age of 87. Shepard was a fighter pilot who lost part of his right leg when he was shot down over Germany in 1944. After returning to the U.S., he resumed an earlier baseball career and was signed to the Senators, pitching in just one major league game. His impressive performance, striking out a Boston Red Sox batter with the bases loaded, gave hope to thousands of wounded veterans.

Through his life, Shepard was an advocate for opportunities for people with disabilities. “A handicapped person’s biggest problem is a prospective employer who’s made up his mind that you can’t do something,” he said.

(LA Times photo)

A life of quality

From Lawrence Downes in the New York Times, a piece about Harriet McBryde Johnson, lawyer and defender of the rights of people with disabilities.

What she saw was a world that refused to make room for the severely disabled, one that looked at people like her — if it looked at them at all — with horror, hostility, condescension and pity, a sentiment she hated.

… Ms. Johnson, an atheist, was unmoved by religious appeals to life’s sanctity. Instead, her rebuttal boiled down to a simple: How dare you? How dare you decide that certain people with limitations are nonpersons with no right to exist? How dare you presume to define “quality of life,” for me or anyone else, to set the value of a disabled life lower than yours, or to conclude that such a life lacks the potential for happiness and dignity because you cannot imagine how it could?

The disabled certainly suffer. But everyone does, Ms. Johnson argued, and if the disabled face extra hassles and indignities in life, well, remedies for those things are all possible, and should be provided. Instead, the world is run by and for the nondisabled, and those who don’t measure up are infantilized, ignored and stockpiled in institutions that Ms. Johnson called “the disability gulag.” She feared being sent to it in her later years.

Ms. Johnson was enraged by injustice, but not susceptible to hatred or despair. To her, [philosopher Peter] Singer was a monster, but she realized that the unenlightened also included many of her own friends, colleagues and relatives. She decided that “it’s not in my heart to deny every single one of them, categorically, my affection and my love.”

Ms. Johnson died this week at the age of 50. See earlier post here.

Lawrence Downes is a member of the New York Times editorial board.

Mary Lee Brookshire, 87

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

When Mary Lee Brookshire’s daughter Laura was born with Down syndrome in 1958, doctors advised her to institutionalize her baby. Instead, Mrs. Brookshire brought her daughter home and became an advocate for the rights of people with disabilities. “She made a difference because she modeled to other parents of children with Down syndrome that they could live and thrive in the community,” said Mary Yoder, executive director of the Atlanta Alliance on Developmental Disabilities.

Mrs. Brookshire was active in starting group homes after visiting some private facilities, in which she found people with disabilities kept naked and tied to their beds. “She was just outraged,” said her son, David Brookshire. “She said we treat our pets better than this.”

Drew national attention for her opposition to ‘the charity mentality.’

From the Charleston [S.C.] Post and Courier:

Harriet McBryde Johnson, a tenacious, well-known Charleston disability and civil rights attorney, died suddenly Wednesday. She was 50.

South Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Jean Toal said Johnson was a fierce advocate for the disabled, a nationally revered attorney and a titanic figure in state legal history.

Johnson was perhaps best known for her 2003 New York Times Magazine cover story “Unspeakable Truths.” The first-person piece described her journey to Princeton University to debate ethicist Peter Singer over his advocacy for the legalization of selective infanticide of children with disabilities. The cover of the magazine carried a photo of Johnson in her power wheelchair with the headline “Should I have been killed at birth?”

He insists he doesn’t want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.

Whenever I try to wrap my head around his tight string of syllogisms, my brain gets so fried it’s . . . almost fun. Mercy! It’s like ”Alice in Wonderland.”

Johnson also drew national attention for her opposition to “the charity mentality” and “pity-based tactics” of the annual Lewis muscular dystrophy telethon. She protested the telethon for nearly 20 years.

She was the author of the unconventional memoir Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life, a wry exploration of her life in “Cripworld,” and the young adult novel Accidents of Nature, about teens at a summer camp for children with disabilities in the 1970s.

Johnson, who had a congenital neuromuscular disorder, ran a solo law practice in Charleston.

News and Courier profile of Harriet McBryde Johnson is here.

Profile from New Mobility is here.

Late addition: June 7, 2008, obituary from the New York Times is here.