"Raping the Retard Vote" - Rightwing Voter Integrity Project Attacks Disabled Voting Rights

[KamaAina]

http://www.thismess.net/2016/11/raping-retard-vote-rightwing-voter.html

The image shows a screenshot from MSNBC (Maddow) with an article called, "Raping the 'Retard' Vote" and a picture of Kim Kardashian (for no coherent reason). You can read the current article here, the text of which remains unchanged. It's now called, "Reaping vulnerable voters."

In an election season which has shown unprecedented media attention to the legal and ethical necessity of making voting accessible to people with disabilities, this article surges the other way. Although it claims to be protecting exploitation, in fact it's a piece of intense rhetorical dehumanization followed by a call for specific actions designed to intimidate and bully potential disabled voters.

The article asserts that Democratic parents and care-workers "drag" disabled people to the polls, focusing on individuals with varying types of mental, intellectual, and developmental disabilities. The author offers a few examples, consistently describing people with disabilities as objects whose votes are "harvested." As a solution, it recommends filming people with disabilities preparing to vote, and sharing that footage with VIP for mass release....

There are moments when something is offensive and one hesitates to give them attention. Then there are acts of offense so great that they must be named, they must be condemned. For me, this piece - even with the less awful headline - falls into that latter category. It reflect an extreme version of the kinds of ableist stigma that we see constantly. This anti-voting-rights group has deliberately called into question the basic competency of people with varying types of disabilities into question. They advocate - presume incompetence, presume suspicion, videotape, report, and shame disabled people.

If I were a Trumpanzee, I would be extremely careful about accusing anyone of "raping" anything.

[mothra1orbit]

1. I would not want to have to prove to anyone

that my daughter has any understanding of what she is doing when she makes her mark on her absentee ballot. I've had a lot of flack from other parents in the disability support group, but I am convinced that helping her to vote is the right thing to do.

The quality of my daughter's life, in every single detail, depends directly on who is in power locally, state-wide and nationally. The results of elections mean immeasurably more to her life than it does to mine or to that of anyone I know. If she does not cast a ballot, she relinquishes any sort of influence on what happens to her.

She lives on social security disability benefits; her health needs are covered by Medicaid and Medicare; the people who care for her and the house she shares with a couple of other disabled women are all paid for by tax dollars. The public pays for the food she eats and the clothes she wears. She spends her days in a program run by state and county agencies. Who is in charge of these funds is for all practical purposes the most important group of people in her life, yet there are people who say she has no right to help choose them.