Two weeks after a young man with autism and challenging behaviors was barred from a church in Minnesota, today’s Boston Globe carries a story about efforts by a community of faith in Massachusetts to include a young man with autism.

Joshua Aaron Krane (left) made his Bar Mitzvah with the help of a program called Gateways: Access to Jewish Education, which offers religious training to more than 145 young people with learning disabilities.

Gateway arranged for Josh’s ceremony to be held in a classroom on a Thursday afternoon, because he is extremely sensitive to distraction or breaks in his regular routine. It also helped him to use nontraditional technology. He led the congregation in prayer with a Powerpoint presentation on a laptop computer.

Widely quoted in the article is Bill Gaventa, a minister and director of community and congregational supports for the Elizabeth M. Boggs Center on Developmental Disabilities at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey. Gaventa and former Pennsylvania First Lady Ginny Thornburgh will be the keynote speakers at a Philadelphia-area conference this week on including people with disabilities in communities of faith.

Many thanks to Pam Wilson of Bellaonline for sharing information on the conference!

See also: News and commentary about the documentary Praying with Lior.

A profile and extended Q&A with new comic Maysoon Zayid, in Punchline magazine. Zayid has been a subject of the PBS documentary America at a Crossroads: Stand Up: Muslim Comics Come of Age, and has a role in Adam Sandler’s latest goofball feature, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan.

Zayid will also serve as a performer and delegate to the Democratic National Convention, and her one-woman stage show is being turned into a movie. She does charity work with Maysoon’s Kids, an organization she founded in 2001 that provides assistance to children with disabilities in Palestine.

Zayid is an Arab-American — her parents emigrated from Palestine to New Jersey — and a Muslim, and she also has cerebral palsy.

In her words, she’s the “first shaking comic without a drug problem.”

With video. An excerpt:

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From the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), an article by Lila Guterman about prenatal screening for thalassemia on the island of Cyprus.

Cyprus has a high rate of thalassemia, an inherited blood disease, and people there are required to get tested before marriage to find out whether they carry the gene. Prenatal genetic screening is voluntary, but the state pays for abortions when thalassemia is diagnosed.

Even though the Greek Orthodox Church in Cyprus views abortion as a sin, it seems most people are taking that path. Without the screening program, approximately 70 babies would be born with thalassemia each year — one in every 158 births on the island. But no more than one or two such babies have been born in any year since the mid-1980s.

Ruth Schwartz Cowan, a professor of the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania, has worked to document how and why Cypriots came to adopt and support the screening program. (Earlier post here.) After dozens of interviews on both sides of the island, she came to realize that people in every sector of society had strong reasons to consider the program ethical.

Some Western Europeans and Americans, however, have voiced doubts. They wonder whether reducing the number of people born with the disease will undermine medical care for existing patients. Others worry that the program sits on a slippery slope leading to screening programs for less-deadly diseases.

But the success on Cyprus proves those concerns are hollow, contends Ms. Cowan.

Darts, laurels on use of ‘people-first’ language in coverage

Pope Benedict XVI blessed a group of children with disabilities on a visit to Yonkers yesterday. From www.catholic.org:

God has blessed you with life, and with differing talents and gifts. Through these you are able to serve him and society in various ways. While some people’s contributions seem great and others’ more modest, the witness value of our efforts is always a sign of hope for everyone.

Sometimes it is challenging to find a reason for what appears only as a difficulty to be overcome or even pain to be endured. Yet our faith helps us to break open the horizon beyond our own selves in order to see life as God does. God’s unconditional love, which bathes every human individual, points to a meaning and purpose for all human life. Through his Cross, Jesus in fact draws us into his saving love and in so doing shows us the way ahead — the way of hope which transfigures us all, so that we too, become bearers of that hope and charity for others.

The full text of his remarks.

Here’s a rundown on the use of people-first language (or not) in media coverage of the meeting.

Laurels go to Newsday, which said the Pope met with “young people with disabilities,” the Washington Post (”children with disabilities”) and the Associated Press (”youngsters with disabilities”).

Double darts go to the Newark Star-Ledger for using the term ‘disabled children’ in a headline on a story that also used the term “profoundly disabled children.” The New York Times gets a single dart for a story that said the Pope was meeting with “disabled children,” as does Catholic New Service, which led with a reference to “disabled youth.”

Both a dart and a laurel go to CNN. Their Sunday morning coverage carried a tagline about “disabled children” (no video available), but the web print version says “children with disabilities.”

More sightings, anyone?

From the Raleigh [NC] News & Observer and WTVD, the ABC affiliate in Raleigh-Durham, extended features on Tricia Lawrenson and her husband Nathan. Tricia has cystic fibrosis; the couple are evangelical Christians. Their story is framed as a journey of religious faith and triumph over adversity. Tricia had been scheduled to get a double lung transplant when she learned she was pregnant. Doctors took her off the transplant list and advised that the pregnancy would jeopardize her chances for survival; some counseled abortion, which the couple declined.

As committed evangelicals, the Lawrensons believe that life begins at conception and abortion is akin to murder. More important, they believed God wanted this pregnancy and helped bring it about.

“Our choice simply came down to whether or not we were seriously willing to trust God,” Nathan wrote later on his blog “Confessions of a CF Husband.” “And really, what else did we have to hang on to at that point?”

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Carrie Rickey, film critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, praises the documentary Praying with Lior as “poignant and profound.” Lior Liebling, its star, is Philadelphia’s “most radiant movie star.”

She concludes:

… Lior is an agent both of social and spiritual change.

Bring tissues.

Earlier posts here and here and here. In limited release.

UNC Prof. Albert Harris recently told his biology class that older women should terminate pregnancies if Down syndrome is diagnosed.

Two op-eds from the Charlotte [North Carolina] News & Observer:

Out of touch on Down syndrome

Ellen Russell, who recently celebrated her 29-year-old daughter Emily’s marriage (photo at left), questions Prof. Harris’ assertion that a child with Down syndrome had “ruined” the lives of a family of his acquaintance. She says such a statement misses the lesson of the last thirty-plus years of advocacy by families of people with intellectual disabilities.

Perhaps that family could never access what it needed in the educational, social, day-care, employment or medical systems. Perhaps it didn’t have the encouragement of family, neighbors and friends. It is impossible for me to accept that it was the child who ruined their lives. I can give a hundred personal examples of families whose lives have flourished and benefited from the experience of having a child with Down syndrome.
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