Some find it galling that Clint Eastwood, who waged a very public battle in 2000 fighting the Americans with Disabilities Act's access mandate for businesses, would then make a movie in which he helps a quadriplegic die.
But the moral complexities of the movie are not about access to buildings. They're about access to assisted suicide.
It's wrong to lump disability rights opposition with that from the Christian right. Their opposition is based on "sanctity of life" arguments. Disability rights opposition comes from a liberal political perspective; "death with dignity" laws are "disparate impact legislation" -- laws that affect minorities more than other people. The minority in this case? People with severe disabilities.
"Since virtually all people who request hastened death have old or new disabilities, we're essential to the debate," wrote Barry Corbet, longtime editor of the disability magazine New Mobility. Right-to-die laws "are about us."
"Many of our allies in the civil rights and health care movements have found this hard to understand. Isn't this about individual autonomy and rights, they ask?" says attorney Diane Coleman, founder of Not Dead Yet, the national disability rights group with the Monty Python name organized to oppose legalization of assisted suicide.
"No, we say, it's about disability discrimination, a profit-oriented health care system, and a legal system that does not guarantee the equal protection of the law," she wrote in a 2000 article for the American Bar Association.
"If the right to die with dignity is about choice," one reader told me, "what about my choice to lead a dignified life? Where's the choice when most of the stores in my neighborhood won't remove barriers? Where's the choice when the only way I can get personal care is to live is a nursing home?"
Yet disability criticism is dismissed as mere "political correctness," for "Million Dollar Baby's" ethic resonates emotionally: People think it kind to grant the wish of a severely disabled person who asks us to help them die.
That mindset explains why "The Sea Inside" has been such a hit with critics and why movies such as "Whose Life is it, Anyway?" become immensely popular. The killings are always acts of love, selfless and heroic, fueled by the myth "that nothing can be done about the undignified lives of people with disabilities except to help them die," as Chapman University's Art Blaser puts it. "Films with a 'better dead than disabled' message will always raise serious disability rights concerns."
Actively helping someone end his or her life is illegal in every state. But laws permitting a doctor to provide lethal medication are being contemplated in California, Vermont, Hawaii and Arizona (such a law is in force only in Oregon). Proponents insist safeguards exist. But those safeguards, says attorney Harriet McBryde Johnson, "are about defining a class whose desire to die may be presumed rational, because of illness or disability so 'bad' that no 'reasonable' person would want to endure it."
Right to die laws, she says, have "the power to validate and structure prejudice -- to tell suicidal newbies that yes, it really is as bad as it feels, and don't expect it ever to get better. They tell the larger society that disability and illness equal misery, so there's no need to bother about making our lives good. There's an easy way out."
Mary Johnson's latest book is "Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve & The Case Against Disability Rights." She covered the disability rights movement for the Disability Rag magazine and now edits www.raggededgemagazine.com.
Thursday, February 24, 2005 MARY JOHNSON GUEST COLUMNIST
© 1998-2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
© 1998-2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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