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Plenary 1: Women with Disabilities and Allies Forum
(CART Transcripts)
(Ms. Ortoleva) - Good morning. Is everybody awake? It's time to get up. Anyone who is in the hallway, please come and join us. We are first going to be welcomed by a song from Jamie Ray. She is a lawyer who is also a person for the morning and going to be our singer, so please give a good welcome to Jamie. We will turn it over to you.
Good morning, my name is Jamie Ray. As it was said I am a lawyer and a person. I am also a person with a disability. Until I came here this morning just now I thought I had heard every lawyer joke there was, but clearly I was wrong.
This morning I am going to be singing a song called I Sing the Body Electric. The song is from the movie Fame, and it is really important to me because I think it says something about the power that is inside all of us and that the things that make us unique are also the things that make us who we are, so I hope that this song says something to you, and as I start, I would like to especially thank the person that you are going to hear on the piano on the tape who is my vocal instructor. Her name is Susanne.
So I sing the body electric. I sing the body electric, I celebrate the me to come. I look back on Venus, I look back on Mars, and ten million stars. Every time, every time we will all be stars. I sing the body electric. I glory in the glow of rebirth, creating my own tomorrow when I shall embody the earth. And I'll serenade Venus, I'll serenade Mars, and I'll burn with the fire, ten million stars, and in return, in return, we will all be stars. We are the emperors now, and we are the czars, and in time, and in time we will all be stars. (applause)
Thank you all very much, and have a wonderful conference.
(Ms. Ortoleva) - Thank you so much, Jamie, for a beautiful song, an inspiring one. I should introduce myself. I am Stephanie Ortoleva.
I have been a NOW activist for a bit of time I am also a civil rights lawyer working here in the Washington, D.C. area. I wanted to welcome everyone to the first and hopefully not the last Women with Disabilities and Allies Forum Linking Arms for Equality & Justice for All. It is an inspirational introduction which has had a lot of meaning to me in terms of bringing together feminists who are both women's rights activists and disability rights activists, member and women, people from the NOW Foundation, people with disabilities, two wonderful organizations that have linked arms for equality and justice for all.
I just wanted to say a couple of words about what this all means to me in terms of women getting together and men, our supporters, of course, linking together to bring women access to places such as domestic violence shelters, linking together to bring all women access to health care, bringing together all women with disabilities, women without disabilities, women who currently do not have disabilities, bringing us all together for economic empowerment and justice, linking our arms for all of the struggles that are important to us.
I also just wanted to say a few words about those women who are no longer with us who have worked so hard for women's rights, both for the rights of women with disabilities and for the rights of all women. One remembers, of course, with great passion Patsy Mink, our wonderful activist congresswoman from Hawaii, one remembers with great joy a summer intern who worked hard on this conference last year and is not with us this year, one remembers just Barbara Waxman, a woman who worked so hard on fighting for violence against women and just the hundreds of other people who have left us, Justin Dart, many activists. The thing that inspires me, later at lunchtime we are going to hear from young feminists and disability rights activists, the people who will continue the struggle of those who are no longer with us.
So I just want to welcome you all to this conference and hope that you all have a wonderful time, that you link arms together, that you talk with your sisters who work in different movements than your own, and learn from each other, understand each other, when you agree and when you disagree.
I just wish you all a very happy and challenging, thought-provoking and energizing conference. Now I just want to introduce our first speaker who will also welcome you, Kim Gandy, who is the president of the National Organization for Women Foundation and also president of NOW.
Kim is another one of us lawyers, you are just surrounded here. But we are people. Kim has done much for women's rights, has worked for women's rights tirelessly, both as a volunteer with NOW over many years in Louisiana, where she has served in many positions, as well as now with great joy being the president of our National Organization for Women and the NOW Foundation.
(Ms. Gandy) - Thank you, Stephanie. Another person with a law degree. I want to thank very much Stephanie, you heard earlier from the co-chairs of the NOW, an absolutely incredible, incredible amount of work in putting this conference together, Andy Imparato, my great ally who I look forward to doing much more work with and his terrific staff at AAPD, and I also want to thank our two vice presidents who worked so hard on this, Carrie Johnson and Olga Vives who is on the panel here, our action vice president who worked with the program committee.
I am not going to do a lot of talking because what I really want is for you to hear from the great presenters and to have an opportunity to talk among yourselves, but I was reminded again this week how important it is that we all work together. We had somewhat of a loss this week despite a lot of effort.
I was in Gaithersburg on Tuesday testifying at the Food and Drug Administration that there should not be dangerous silicone gel breast implants on the market. I heard from women who were suffering extraordinary disabilities as a result of silicone gel leaking into their bodies and traveling, lodging into their organs, causing tissue diseases, fibromyalgia, cancer, and yet this panel was so pressured by the manufacturers and by the plastic surgery industry to allow them to have greater and greater profits, that despite the fact that there was not evidence of the long-term safety of these implants, in fact quite the opposite, they decided 9-6 to make them available anyway, and one of the doctors was a woman who was right up until lunch, until after lunch on the second day was planning to vote no based on the testimony that she heard from women, women who have held garage sales all over the country to try to get themselves to Washington so they could testify.
We sponsored several of the doctors and researchers who came to testify to the long-term problems with silicone gel breast implants. But she finally said in the afternoon the second day, she eventually was one of the nine who voted yes, she said, so I am faced with a problem before she made up her mind to vote yes to approve something which does not have the data to support its safety seems to me to be irresponsible, but not to expand access seems mean. I got an E-mail from the niece of one of the consultants that we were working with to whom we had sent -- I did an op/ed for the Detroit News.
I have two little girls 8 and 10, and it was a bedtime story for my daughter. The point of it was to create this sort of fantasy of this great experiment that made lots and lots of people sick but the people that it did not make sick really, really loved it, and the people that did not get sick simply did not believe that there were any problems with it because, after all, they did not get sick, and they really wanted everyone to benefit from this wonderful experiment, but the women who got sick were very upset.
They did not want other people to get sick. It was the back and forth of that. We sent that out to some people to see what the reaction was to approaching an op/ed in that kind of way as opposed to just a factual, the kind of thing we always do. It was interesting that this young woman's take on it was just, she was so off the charts about the comments that she heard, that she really did not even focus on the question. She just ended her E-mail something like, okay, I'll get off my soapbox now.
This really bothered me when I read it on MSN.com this morning. It really angers me even more now. She goes on to say with the responsibility of the FDA. Then she says, in applying the doctor's theory to another real problem facing our nation, the outcry far and wide would be obvious, should she stand before an audience of high school teens and say, it's okay to not make your boyfriend wear a condom. We all know it has the potential to be unsafe, but wouldn't you all rather be irresponsible rather than mean? Let me say, the panel of young women coming up later today, they have their finger right on the pulse of what is going on, and they have the ability sometimes better than their more seasoned allies to get right to the point and to say what is really going on.
I guess I am focusing on this because the hurt, if you will, is so fresh from this defeat on this panel because we really believed that the evidence from the doctors, the scientific evidence which we felt was very strong and incredibly moving stories from the women surely would break through the hardened hearts of these doctors, and we almost did, 9-6. The FDA does not have to agree with this panel.
We certainly intend to continue fighting. This is just one of many areas where there is a crossover between our organizations, and where together we are so much stronger than we would be working separately. Thank you for being here.
(Ms. Ortoleva) - Now we will have a welcome from Andy Imparato, who is the president and chief executive officer of American Association of People with Disabilities. He is another lawyer. It will stop soon. Andy has been active in disability rights for many, many years, having served as counsel to the National Council on Disability and another number of positions. He is just a great wonderful, feminist guy.
(Anthony J. Imparato) - I think it is so cool you can move podiums up and down with a button. Pardon me while I do this. It is great to be here. Let me just start by doing something that we like to do at AAPD to wake people up, I say what do we want? Everybody will say civil rights, I'm going to say when do we want it? Everybody will say now. What do we want? Civil rights. When do we want it? Now. What do we want? Civil rights. When do we want it? Now. Thank you. Just in case the hotel is confused.
I want to start by really thanking Kim and acknowledging Kim Gandy for her long-term leadership on behalf of women with disabilities. AAPD is very excited to be working with NOW under Kim's leadership on a number of issues, including judicial nominations. We both suffered a lot in the courts recently. I know Olga will be talking about that on this panel. But there are so many issues that we could be working together on that we will be talking about at this conference.
As Kim mentioned, this would not have happened without a lot of hard work, mostly by the folks that are in your program on the organizing committee. I wanted to just say their names again. If people who are involved in the organizing can either stand or raise their hand, I want to read all the names and then get a round of applause for the organizers. AAPD's chief operating officer, Helena Berger has been extraordinary. Joanne from NOW Pennsylvania, Stephanie Ortoleva who you just heard from, Helen Roth who is AAPD's vice chair and who you heard from last night.
I don't know if she has made it down yet. We will applaud her in her absence. Then Greta Edwards from the NOW board and Mary from the staff. Let's hear it for all of them. I also want to thank the sponsors for this conference. We heard from Oracle last night. We were excited that the Ethel Louise Armstrong, the Land Mine Survivors Network, the Maryland Developmental Disabilities Council, and the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund.
So let's hear it for the sponsors. As Kim mentioned, the real point this morning is to hear from the panelists, so I will not talk much longer. I am really here to welcome all of you. AAPD was founded on the 5th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Our mission is political and economic empowerment for children and adults with disabilities, and that very much includes girls and women with disabilities who represent the majority of our constituency and the majority of AAPD's members.
Just as a person with a psychiatric disability, I want to acknowledge that most of my mentors in the disability movement have been women with disabilities, people like Marca Bristo and many others, and I think as a movement we are getting better and better about including the diverse constituencies that are part of the disability community, and I think it is through leadership from people like Marca and others we are reaching out more and more. I think one good way to reach out is to do it in partnership with organizations like NOW, with organizations like the National Council of La Raza, NAACP, and others who can bring the disability rights movement together with other civil rights movements. I look forward to doing more forums like this in the future.
This is AAPD's first conference we have organized. We are excited to do it in partnership with NOW, and we are honored to have this opportunity. AAPD's goals are really the same as the goals of this conference -- unity, leadership, and impact. So we really encourage all of you to learn from each other at this conference, to work together, and to leave inspired to work that much harder for the cause of equality and justice for all. Thank you very much.
(Ms. Ortoleva) - Thank you, Andy. I also wanted to thank the person who did a lot of fund-raising work for our scholarship fund, Tony Van Pelt from Florida NOW. She did an incredible amount of work. She wishes greatly that she was here. She really wanted to join us, but a business commitment has kept her away. Her way of giving to us was to use her great skills as a travel agent to get people here and help in that effort. I want to thank Tony for her wonderful work.
Our next speaker is Marca Bristo. Marca is our keynote today. Marca has been a leader for disability rights, women's rights for many, many years. She currently serves as the president and executive director of Access Living in Chicago, briefly served as the beloved chair of the National Council on Disability, has been appointed by the president and Congress to various positions throughout her career, has won numerous awards, and is an inspiring and wonderful speaker, so I encourage you to listen with great care to her words today. Marca.
(Ms. Bristo) - Thank you, Stephanie. Well, first I want to thank all of you who have come up to me since I have been here and given me your condolences for the Cubs loss. Thank you very much. I was there, and it really broke my heart. But we'll be back again next year, hopefully with the Red Sox. Anyway, thank you so much, Andy, and Kim, for inviting me to be here. I am not a lawyer, but lest our lawyers in the crowd get a bad rap, I really want to say a special thank you to the likes of Kim and Andy who could be out in corporate America earning the big bucks and instead have dedicated their lives to making the world a better place for all of us. So thank you.
I do want to speak to whoever gave the title to this conference, though, and suggest we revise it a little. Linking arms or prosthetic devices or whatever for equality and justice for all. Even while we are here, I want to bring regards to you all from another great woman, Yoshiko Dart, who has left this morning on a flight to Japan, equipped with her brand new poster in true Dart form of the beautiful rising sun. Do you all remember, those of you in the disability community, the bumper sticker, poster, postcards that said ADA, America Wins?
Well, in traditional Dart style she has crafted a similar message that says JDA, Japan Wins. She is off to host a memorial service for Justin and to help the disability community get the Japanese Disability Act introduced. Ours truly is a worldwide movement.
As you will hear a little later, personally I have so much to thank to the women's movement who changed my life and opened my world and my vision and later to the disability rights movement who when I was struggling put me back together again, got me on my feet or my wheels and gave me back my life. Both have made me stronger.
I want to thank all of you individually here and collectively for that gift. The title of this conference is, in fact, quite appropriate. The premise underlying this conference that we must work together towards our shared goals, using our shared principles to guide us, that we have much to gain and little to lose by coalescing is so common sensical as to be almost trite. After all, we are being clobbered by the compassionate conservatives who through semantic gymnastics have shifted the country to the pro-life, pro family public agenda, our courts are being taken over by ideologues from the Federalist Society who are slowly but surely taking us to a 21st century version of Jim Crow states rights. Our tax dollars are being ripped out of the very programs which stand to set us free, education, health care, housing, civil rights, domestic violence services, while the Bush version of Reaganomics make the rich richer and deplete our national resources, growing our deficit to untold levels. Our futures and the futures of our children are being hijacked as our sons and daughters die in a war that America did not want, fought on premises of lies and corruption and deception.
Against this backdrop and our common history of oppression, it makes sense that our movements, the women's movement and the disability rights movements would naturally coalesce to create a more potent force for social change. Meetings such as this have happened but with different sponsors many times since the 1970s.
We share common historical experience, poverty, violence, relative political powerlessness, marginalization, and we share common principles of self-determination, choice, equality, and empowerment. If it makes so much sense, then why haven't we done so? Why, except for a few intermediaries who float between the two movements, don't we coalesce? I am not sure that I have the answers, but I do believe that it is time we seek them. For me, the journey begins by sharing all or most of us here share the common experience of being female and some share the common experience of being women with disabilities. We need to demystify the disability experience to let you know what it means to be disabled in America.
Simply stated, disabled women are at the margins of all the margins, on virtually all socioeconomic measures we are the "worst of the worst" unless, of course, you happen to be a disabled woman of color who are hit by the triple whammy of discrimination. Collectively, we are the least well educated, the poorest, the least involved in our community, the most institutionalized, the least employed, and when employed the least well paid.
But that only tells part of our story, and taken by itself the demographics reinforce the powerlessness and stereotypes which trap us in this cycle of poverty.
The picture victimizes us and separates us further. It leaves you to conclude that we are poor, uneducated, unemployed, et cetera because of our disabilities. Nothing could be further from the truth. (applause)
It is not our disability that traps us in this seemingly endless cycle of disability. It is the outdated public policies based on these outdated attitudes that oppress us. Just as it has been for women. This paradigm shift from a medical model of disability to a sociopolitical model of disability is at the heart of the social progress and policy revolution which we seek.
Not unlike the women's movement struggled to separate issues of gender from those of sex, biological from social, the disability rights movement is turning the basic assumptions of the medical model, powerlessness, dependency, inability on their head. The problem is that our very marginalization, our separateness has impaired our ability to get the word out. You do not know us.
So today I hope we get past all the platitudes and theory and get personal. It was by doing so that people with disabilities passed the historic Americans with Disabilities Act. For one collective moment in history, we opened up and shared, in the words of my friend Tony Coehlo, our scar tissue. We need to do so here.
We need to talk about how it feels to show up at a rally for choice only to find no interpreter, no speaker with a disability, no ramp, no voice. Talk about the sense of abandonment we feel when we turn to a domestic violence shelter for protection and help only to be told it is not accessible and that it will cost too much to make it so.
All politics are personal. So let me get a little personal. For me the civil and women's rights movements changed my life, gave me hope. I grew up in a farming community in upstate New York in a small town in the 1950s and 1960s.
Nearly all the girls where I lived lived for boys and the attention that they could get from boys. Few went to college. Many became pregnant, many became battered wives. Few got jobs. The jobs they did were low-paying jobs. There were very few options. I knew early on this life was not for me, and I wanted out. I knew no other way to get out other than to take a big geographic detour. So I went to the Philippines as an exchange student, quite a geographic detour, and there, too, I saw the hierarchical patriarchal society at full play.
When I came back from the Philippines, having spent a whole year with very highly educated girls who were being prepared to go and support their husbands' careers, very few worked, very few, in spite of the wealth that the people I lived with had, had many options at all. They were trapped by their husbands' success and prevented from being involved in their community. Many spoke up and organized on our campus, and when I returned to the United States and headed off to college in the 1970s, the civil rights antiwar and women's lib movement had taken hold on college campuses.
Amidst the sexual revolution and the emergence of women's studies programs on campus, I began to redefine myself as a new woman. On campus, our first women's studies program was being organized, and I volunteered to help the professor organize the course work. I read everything I could get my hands on, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Simone de Bouvoir's second sex. I decided to dedicate my professional life to changing the world around us. I merged my interest in biology and my desire to do things in an alternative way with the career goal to become a nurse/midwife.
I moved to Chicago and entered one of the more oppressive academic environments -- nursing school. Oh, my. This should tell us something about the state of affairs for women. Only would you have a field today that is understaffed, jobs in great demand, with salaries at such a low level. Nowhere else would that be allowed. Those salaries would have skyrocketed. They have not.
Anyway, back here I was in Chicago preparing to become a nurse/midwife, working in labor and delivery and really filled with a sense of excitement for my future, and then one day while out with a group of friends I dived into Lake Michigan to retrieve a pair of slippers that had a lot of memory value.
I had just gotten back from a trip to Jamaica and I wanted my shoes back after my friend's dog knocked them into the water. So I dived in, and like that my world changed. The water that looked very deep was only one and a half feet deep. I broke my neck. I knew I broke my neck. As I was laying on the beach. I was whisked into the medical model of disability. I was the good patient. I made it through the rehab process with flying colors, but inside, inside I was very alienated.
I knew I was the same person I had always been, but I also knew I was very different and I had no way to put those two selves back into one. As a woman, 23-year-old who had been raised in the sexual revolution of the 1970s, I came out of the hospital about to go back to my life, went out with my friends and was quickly greeted by a whole different world.
Men, in particular, looked right through me, like I wasn't even there. Now I had actively worked and decided not to be defined by the way men viewed me. I rejected the notion of being a sexual object, and now that I was not being seen as one, it felt in a strange way like I missed it. What inner conflict I felt, what inner conflict I felt to be sexually sort of devalued. All of a sudden I yearned for those days of being treated as a sex object, and I was so confused by that inner conflict and had nowhere to go with it, no one to speak to about it.
Eventually, as I got on with my own self as a woman, I discovered that all of the birth control advances that we had worked so hard on for women, even though they still remained limited in their effectiveness and safety, had passed me by as a disabled woman. All the methods that were there for me were either unsafe or too difficult for me to do. I had to make the choice between safety, my life or taking the chance of getting pregnant. So for many disabled women, abortion became not a choice but the primary means of birth control. It changes your view of choice when other choices are not there for you.
Choice only exists when there is a range of acceptable options. So it did not feel wonderful for me to be faced with pregnancies I did not want. Choosing to use abortion, which I had fought for, but which was now really the only safe choice I had. In the midst of all this, a beacon of hope appeared.
I had lost my job as a nurse and really had anticipated that I was not going to be able to go back to work, so I was trying to get the vocational rehab system to allow me to. They basically told me I would not be successful any longer as a nurse. Then one day a woman, a feminist head of our nursing department called me out of the blue on the phone. I had only worked for her for six weeks. She called me up and said, would you like to come back to work? I could not believe my ears. I couldn't believe it. This woman used principles of the Americans with Disabilities Act 15 years before that law existed. She took apart two jobs and put them back together differently so that the tasks that I could do I was able to do, and the tasks that I could not do were given to someone else, making both of us happier and most significantly making me employed. So off I went to work. I might add, getting to work was a challenge.
I used public transit before I had my accident. There was no public transportation in Chicago for disabled people at this time. It cost $100 to put me into the publicly funded, you pay for it medivan, a dollar a mile, and then to go home another $100, another dollar a mile.
To get to driver's ed, it cost me $250 a day, actually it cost you $250 a day. Eventually I learned to drive and was able to get to and from. But that experience haunted me years later in hindsight. It never dawned on me that there was anything wrong with the public buses. I had so internalized the medical model that said I was broken, I needed to be fixed, and if I could not be fixed I had to accept my limitations. The medical model of disability traps us and causes us to oppress ourselves.
When years later I look back at those buses and realize that all it took was moving the technology off of the 100 dollar vehicle per ride on to the public bus, I was rather embarrassed that I had never seen that before.
Anyway, now I am in my new job in a sexuality women's health clinic, and for reasons I will never understand, as more and more disabled women were referred to me, I was there to do family planning and birth control and sexuality counseling. I started to write their names down on my ink blotter. I was not sure why I was even doing it. But one day I sat down with all of their charts. There were 26 of them. I read them all at once. It overwhelmed me what I saw. Page after page of incomplete medical records.
All of the questions about sexuality, are you using birth control, are you sexually active were blank. 26 charts, 24 of them were blank. The whole reason this clinic existed, the whole point of my job was sexuality and family planning. The baseline information needed to get these women what they came there for either had never been asked or we had one of the sloppiest record keeping teams I have ever seen. I took those charts up to my supervisor's office and put them on her desk and said, "This is wrong." She looked at it and said, "You are right. Will you help us fix it?" As I sat there thinking about how I would help her fix it, flooding back to me came all these experiences, the number of people who had been referred to me simply because I was disabled who were not even there for sexuality or family planning. They had fibroid tumors or some other such thing.
So I said, why in the world would they refer them to me other than the fact that I was like them and perhaps it got them off the hook of their discomfort? Or the women who we sent home early day after day because that expensive medivan came before they had been seen, untreated, unseen, and who knows whether they would ever come back again.
Or the women we sent home unseen because we could not, did not have enough staff to get them on to the inaccessible exam table. And probably the last straw for me, as I sat there reflecting on this, was a young woman with cerebral palsy who was not verbal and used the Ouija board to communicate. We sat in my office one day, she came in, I knew her well. She started to cry, not little tears, sobbing, overwhelming tears. After she calmed down and we struggled through the communication, I learned that the source of her pain was that she had just been sterilized against her will. No one had listened to her.
They would not take the time to go through the process of understanding her communication. She gave up and signed the form because she got so frustrated with her inability to make herself heard. I then thought back to the days as a labor nurse, one day I had a deaf woman as a client, no sign language interpreter. She came in.
We developed a little system where when she was ready to go into labor she would start clapping. I remember the day this was before I was disabled that I went on a lunch break and forgot to tell my relief nurse about our little plan. So when I came back, I heard this clapping coming from my room, and I raced in to the room just in time to catch the baby. Thank God, thank God that that baby was a healthy baby, thank God that there were no complications. But it was wrong for me to have even put her in that position. She should have had an interpreter.
I did not even know interpreters existed at that point in my life. Anyway, armed with all this insight, my employer sent me to California, of all places, to a conference on women with disabilities, sexuality, and birth control. This was late 1970s. Well, my world changed.
I went to this conference, remembering totally bought into the medical model, and little by little had it fractured for me while I was there. First there were disabled women on the panel, they helped plan the conference. They had something to offer and people were listening. Second, that lift that was on this expensive vehicle back home was on the real honest to God bus there.
Third, there were curb cuts everywhere, everywhere and very significantly people didn't stare right through me like I wasn't even there. I said, "My God, why is this so different?" I started to snoop around. I heard about this emerging disability rights thing. What I came to understand this many years later was that disabled people had taken power and had begun to change their community, and I had walked into the middle of it. It changed me forever more. It made me understand that I needed to know what they knew, and when I came back to Chicago, I started to seek it.
It was through that process of coming in touch with my heroes, people like Judy Humann, Fred Fay, and other people that I put those two parts of myself back together again. They were the glue I needed to heal. I want you all now to think, however, as I move on with my life how many times I was confronted by that sense of abandonment by the women's movement and by the society at large.
Pregnancy number one, I was 34 and pregnant, and about to have a baby. They sent me off to the genetics counselor, a man, who sat down and first asked me if I was really sure about having this baby thing. After all, how was I going to be a mother? Wasn't it going to be just too hard for me? So he deviated from his script in the first place. I didn't appreciate it.
But then he went on to talk to me about my age and the possibility of having a defective fetus, that had I given careful consideration to genetic testing because for me even more than for other people if I did have a Down's Syndrome baby or some other birth defect in there, it would be like close to impossible for you to deal with it. The very clear message was, you know, if you have one of those babies it is okay to get rid of it. Now, I sat there as this newly awakened disabled rights activist thinking, "This is plain wrong." I couldn't put words to it, but it cut at the heart of my soul to hear his prejudicial comments towards me and I suppose towards every other woman 35 and older who walked into his office.
Contrast that to my second pregnancy where I was once again sent off to the genetics counselor. This time it was a disabled woman. By a fluke she sat there and told me of all my options. She told me of my risks, she told me of what that risk translated into in terms of the likelihood of having a disabled infant, and then she told me about the many fine organizations that are out there to support people who have disabled children, and she talked to me from her own life experience that this is not a death sentence, this is something if you choose to do, you can do. It may be difficult, but you can do this.
Later, as I moved through my life in the disability rights movement, women with disabilities were there for me. I started to kind of rise through the field of independent living and at a very historic meeting of the National Council on Independent Living which I had helped found, women with disabilities, fed up with the sexism within the disability organization organized the late night caucus in a hotel room to run a woman's slate. Some people here were there.
We were fed up with us doing all the work and the guys getting all the glory. There were a couple of guys running a very nasty campaign for the presidency and Sharon, may she rest in peace, organized a caucus of disabled women in her hotel room and said we have got to draft some women candidates.
Eventually everyone turned to me and asked me to do it. I tried to chicken out and came up with all the reasons why I could not because I did not feel I had it in me. Those disabled women were there for me. They believed in me before I believed in myself. It was their belief that I could do it, that I latched on to, not my own. They gave me the self-confidence to step forward, to put myself out, and to run for office. I was elected along with a slate of a wonderful crew of women plus Duane French from Alaska, our honorary guy.
Now my experience that I shared with you here today is different than girls and women who have grown up with disabilities or who were born with them, different to be sure in many respects. They had to fight the school system, they had to fight in a different way the medical system, but not so different that we don't deeply understand the common bond that we share. While the women's movement was fighting for equity for women in athletic programs, people like my friend Judy and her mother were fighting to be allowed into elementary school.
Until 1975 in this country millions of kids with disabilities had no legal right to be educated. People like Judy and her mother who wanted nothing more than to go to elementary school with her classmates were told, "Sorry, you can't be here, you would be an insurance risk," and sent her home. It wasn't until 1975 that we passed the federal law to prohibit discrimination in education.
It wasn't until 1975 that our children even had a chance to become educated. While women in the women's movement were fighting to break through the glass ceiling in employment, disabled women hadn't even entered the room where the glass ceiling was and still haven't, and still haven't. We do not even know there is a glass ceiling, all too many of us.
We have been trapped in dependency-oriented programs like social security with their many, many, many built-in disincentives. It doesn't make sense for women with disabilities to go to work when they lose all of the basic support such as health care insurance, when they make the decision to go to work. Now that is changing.
But nowhere near at the rate that it needs to or the degree that it needs to. While women's rights leaders were fighting to preserve women's right to choose against the death threats of the pro-life movement, many of them lumped those of us with disabilities who oppose physician-assisted suicide as having cut a deal with the devil, which we have not. We totally support a woman's right to choose, but we ask you to try for a minute to understand the desperate feeling we have when our very lives, lives like Terry Schiavo in Florida whose feeding tube was pulled on Wednesday in spite of her mother's efforts, in spite of her mother's efforts to look out for her because her spouse wanted to end her life.
Now, I don't know these people. I don't know these people at all. But there is something wrong in our society when a person who still can communicate, who still has a chance has their spouse who, by the way, has a new girlfriend now, was able to override her ability to live. Take a look at Jack Kevorkian's client list if you haven't. Most are women, most are disabled women without terminal illnesses, without terminal illnesses.
But more recently an organization that is pro-physician-assisted suicide on its web site listed examples of people who might need it some day Michael J. Fox. Now, Michael J. Fox is hardly, hardly a candidate for physician-assisted suicide, and yet there he was put up as a poster child, perpetuating that life with disability is worse than death. You might as well die. So we ask you, don't write us off.
Understand that we stand by you on the right to choose, and we will stand by you and work together to oppose those that threaten that right, but take the time to understand what it means to us to have our lives devalued by genetics counselors, doctors, lawyers, and work with us to stand up for our right to live. We must talk about these internal conflicts. They are real and they are important. I know that when we do, they are not insurmountable.
We have so much at stake. Both of us share being circled by the backlash machine that threatens to turn, to blame our movements for our progress, to accuse the women's rights movement for the current status of women as if we have achieved equality when of course we have not. We must reject that finger that points itself accusingly at our movements and blames us for those who would hold us back. Women's issues are disabled issues and disabled issues are women's issues -- economic empowerment, ending discrimination, creating home and community-based services as alternatives to costly institutionalization or family-provided support.
Who most often gives that volunteer unpaid family-provided support? Women. And when they do, they eliminate any potential for their own economic independence. And who is going to live longest, aging into their disabilities and need these home and community-based services? Women. We will be here demographically long after our spouses. Trust me. You do not want the nursing homes that the disability community are fighting so hard, so hard to prevent us from being forced into. We, the disability community, is doing the nation a favor to shift our public policy to home and community-based alternatives. Your life is thrown away when you enter one of those institutions. You never get out.
They take all your money, they take your dignity, they take your pride, they take your choice. Were it not for the gallant leadership of ADAPT and the many others who are working, people would be trapped there forever. We need your help, and you need our help. It is as simple as that. All of us stand to either be liberated or imprisoned according to which path we take. The former assistant Attorney General Patrick said of the challenge of civil rights that there are few moments in history where there exists such a confluence of opportunity and resolve.
This, today, here is one of those moments. Will we rise to the occasion together or will we leave here and go our separate ways? One of the most proud moments of my life was when former Senator Carol Moseley Braun from Illinois, the first African-American woman in the Senate asked me if I would help introduce her campaign.
I joined the podium and had the great opportunity to introduce Gloria Steinem, and after telling her how she changed my life and how much we needed her and how I was glad she was here to support my friend carol in making history, she never met me before, she turned to me, I need your hand, Stephanie, she raised my hand like this, and she said to everyone, "We can't go anywhere until you can go everywhere." (applause)
She made me cry because I knew she meant it, and I knew she got it. Let us not stay put. Let us go everywhere together. Thank you. (applause)
(Ms. Ortoleva) - Sorry. Okay. That was just amazing. Thank you very much, Marca. That was really wonderful. A wonderful challenge. I hope we can all live up to it. Okay, girl, put yourself together.
We are going to move to our next part of our panel presentation. This part of our panel is focusing on the status of civil rights and it is going to have two components. We are going to be talking about voting rights and voting access and we are going to be talking about one area where voting rights will have a dramatic impact which is the selection of judicial nominees, the nightmare that befalls us, and so I would like to first introduce Olga Vives. She is the vice president for action of the National Organization for Women and also the vice president for education of the NOW Foundation, the organization sponsoring this conference. Olga is a wonderful woman and is just a really rousing speaker and a really great dinner companion.
I would like to introduce you to Olga. Olga has emigrated to the United States from Cuba, has worked as a NOW activist for a number of years, has founded a number of very successful businesses and left those to serve tirelessly for NOW as the vice president. Thank you, Olga.
(Ms. Vives) - Thank you. I am so pleased to be here this morning and so inspired by a Chicagoan, I am also from Chicago. Thank you for those wonderful remarks and inspiration. I, too, share your disappointment with the Cubs. It was a very traumatic night the other night. Wait until next year.
I am the action vice president of NOW and also the education president of the NOW Foundation. I am here to talk about this so-called judicial crisis that this administration is articulating. I first want to say that NOW activists and supporters were not surprised at Trent Lott's, Senator Trent Lott's wish for a Thurmond presidency in 1948.
Lott, one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation, which is a multi-million dollar think tank and a major contributor to Reagan policy-making has been quoted as saying that we should go back, turn back the clock to 1954. This got him in trouble, of course. He is no longer a Senate leader, but he is still there. But as we know really what he meant was this, that going back to 1954 means going back to the United States that was legally segregated, a country of civil rights for the powerful and affluent, a country where discrimination against people based on their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, and religious beliefs was allowed, where people really had no protections.
It was also an ERA when government played a very small role in providing programs for those needing them the most, safety net programs, and an era when higher education was limited to a few mostly white upper middle class and upper class males. I was struck by something I saw not long ago, it was a chart that the institute for democracy studies put together.
They put a report showing how the right wing focuses on reversing civil rights gains made since 1964 when we passed the Civil Rights Act and since Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty. What the graph shows really this is a very concerted effort and a plot by the right wing conservatives. They show that there are five basic institutions, all very well funded, and led by prominent conservative reactionaries. These institutions are the center for individual rights which was established in 1988, which focuses on things like elimination of Title IX and they tried this already this year but they were not successful, they tried to eliminate the violence against women legislation and hate speech legislation, so this particular center concentrates on that kind of thing. The second institution is called the Institute for Justice which was established in 1991 and it focuses on public school privatization and vouchers so that their work gears towards bringing down the public school system.
The third entity is the center for equal opportunity which focuses on attacking bilingual education, bilingual usage, and focuses on immigration and immigrants' rights. Its president is Linda Chavez. This entity was founded in 1988. The fourth institution is called the American Civil Rights Institute which focuses on university-based gender and ethnic studies. This institute was established in 1997 with Grover Norquist as one of its founders. The Americans for Tax Reform and the American Civil Rights Coalition are under it. This institute had funded campaigns such as proposition 209 in California and the failed proposition 54 in California which wanted to do away with a classification of people's race, ethnicity, and so forth.
It also funded the Paula Jones case. You remember that case, right? Then the fifth institution which is the one that everyone talks about today is the Federalist Society which focuses on constitutional change and assaults on public policy initiatives, primarily for the courts. It features such prominent radical wing figures as Edwin Meese III, and it gives forum to the most conservative and radical right wing voices in the United States. Vice President Cheney when he wants to say something significant goes there to say it, and does not take any questions from the press. So all of these five organizations are well funded. Who funds these people? These are names you should get familiar with and try to do a little research on.
Well, they are funded primarily from four major foundations. One is the Bradley Foundation. This is the outfit that provided the money for Murray's The Bell Curve, a widely criticized book for racist propaganda that claimed intelligence to be determined by race. The foundation president called the author one of the most, foremost social thinkers in the country. The foundation also funded David Brock's book, The Real Anita Hill. This book was designed to ruin Anita Hill's reputation and secure the confirmation of extremist Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. They wrote the book "Mandate for Leadership," the blueprint for the Reagan administration. So that is the Bradley Foundation.
The second foundation is the Escape Foundation. This funds the American Spectator, a right-wing publication that also played a part in the Paula Jones controversy, and the so-called Arkansas project, a 2.5 billion project to discredit former president Bill Clinton. Another group recruits youth and works in universities with right-wing think tanks, and it funds the Heritage Foundation.
Finally, the Olin Foundation funds the Heritage Foundation, Phyllis Schlafley's organization. This foundation, the Olin Foundation has pumped millions of dollars into universities under the terms of indoctrinating the students on conservative right-wing law. So why is the Republican party focusing on the issues of the radical wing? Well, it is very simple. One of the things they are doing, of course, is trying to stack our courts. Stacking the courts and eliminating our rights caters to different groups that when added together create a majority of voters. The result is a position of power, some of which we are seeing today, that is well funded, well protected, and provides little chance of falling from power.
As we sit here today, we know that our democracy is crumbling under the most egregious attempts to do that, such as things like the U.S. Act I and 2 that are presumed to be passed. I just go back, I was not born in this country, but I have been here long enough to know that this wonderful place we live, the Founding Fathers and Mothers of the United States protected against the possibility of one party or one ideology running all the systems, and they created checks and balances to each institution.
The White House, for example, wants to pass some legislation, but Congress has to pass it or not. The Congress can make laws, but the Federal Court system can oppose the laws or strike them down.
Then we have, of course, what sometimes is called the fourth institution, which is the media. The media can inform the voters of the abuses so the voters can vote the leaders out or not. Today we see all these institutions in a state that we don't think is good for democracy.
The plan of these people who advocate complete power is to eliminate all avenues of appeals and the founders' ideals of checks and balances and to eliminate all channels of a voice for those not in agreement with their ideology. The only way to do this is to rewrite the entire legal landscape, and I am not a lawyer, by the way, I have just been thrown into this fray because of the campaign that we have.
So that is good news within the NOW executive committee because we have two lawyers and two non-lawyers, and so there is balance. The only way to do this, for them to take complete power and to control the all right wing agenda is to rewrite the entire legal landscape and make sure that the process is never exposed to the people. So it is really up to us to expose this plan. George W. Bush, this elected president who now resides in the White House is helping to accomplish this very aggressively.
By the way, I want to go on record here, I am a Bush basher, I cannot stand the guy. Every time I look at him, he represents everything that I am against and reeks of this horrible privileged white male cocky cowboy. Otherwise he is your president. So George W. Bush is helping accomplish this very aggressively, that is to rewrite the entire legal landscape. He is using his presidential power to imprint a reactionary political agenda on the United States judicial system. Having already proclaimed that his model justices are Scalia and Thomas, Bush is following the plan that his father and Ronald Reagan began in the 1980s, and remember we talked about the plan and how these institutions are helping make this coming to fruition. They are filling the courts of appeal with Scalia/Thomas clones. Most of his appointees and nominees are members of the Federalist Society, that is one of the five institutions I mentioned, a right wing breeding ground for judges and lawmakers. In 2000 and 2001, the Federalist Society received over $15 million from the foundations I mentioned before. Very well funded.
Judges that have their origins in the Federalist Society are well known extremists. They are, among many others, persons such as Judge Robert Bork, Senator Orrin Hatch who is the leader of the Judiciary Committee, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Spencer Abraham, Gail Norton, Solicitor General Ted Olson, former independent counsel Ken Starr, and former Christian Coalition president and Reagan cabinet secretary Don O'Dell. So why are courts so important to the civil rights and why is it that now with AAPD and many other civil rights organizations are so concerned with this and try to bring this message to you so that you lose sleep over it such like we do? Although most of us think of the United States Supreme Court as the final decision-maker in U.S. law, for the majority of cases that cross the judicial system, the U.S. circuit Court of Appeals are the real end of the road for thousands of cases per year. Last year, for example, the Supreme Court heard only 74 cases.
As the caseload the Supreme Court hears gets smaller and smaller, more and more decisions are left to the circuit courts. Given that the circuit court judges are appointed for lifetime terms, and by the way, once they are being appointed now are very young. They are in their 40s, a lifetime appoint. , a court bench of right wing conservative judges will result in 30 to 40 years of right wing policy, affecting the lives of many people. Reproductive rights, privacy rights, civil rights, the rights of disabled are all at risk.
There are 13 federal appellate courts, and they hear and decide almost 30,000 cases per year. They are the courts of last resort for most cases, and their decisions are equally binding in their circuits as the Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court only weighs in primarily when two circuits interpret the law differently.
The lawyers need to challenge them, too, but I think that is true. At the current rate, if all or most of Bush's nominees are confirmed, all 13 federal circuits courts of appeal will be controlled by Republican- appointed judges, and with no ideological balance between the circuits and consequently no effect among them, few cases will be brought to the Supreme Court, and the circuit court will be the law of the land. Eight of the 13 circuit courts are controlled by the Republican conservative majority.
Only three are led by democratic majority and two are split for control. The battle for retaining some forum in our judicial system for the progressive majority are the DC district, the 10th Circuit Court which includes Colorado, Kansas, and some states there, and the 6th Federal District Court which includes Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. This Republican administration is making significant progress in achieving their goal of stacking the courts. This is why it is so important that we take the Senate back. That is one of the reasons.
George W. Bush was blessed in this endeavor with a record number of vacancies from the Clinton administration. 35 percent of all of President Clinton's nominees were blocked by the Republican-controlled Senate. Of the 65 percent not blocked, 45 percent never received a vote on the Senate floor. So the election of 2000 or that fiasco where the Supreme Court took over the country by selecting our president paid off Republican efforts. Within four months of taking the oath of office, George W. Bush eliminated a 50-year screening program put into effect by the American Bar Association.
Without the ABA screening efforts, it has been much easier to nominate his nominees. Is there really a judicial crisis? You hear a lot of propaganda about this. I am going to say there is no judicial crisis. Look at these numbers. President Bush now has had 164 of his nominees confirmed, between the 107th and 108th Congress. Out of these 29 are Circuit Court and 134 are District Court. Just to give you a comparison, President Clinton had an average in four years of 188 judges confirmed.
Now, Bush has had 164 so far. There have only been two rejections in the 107th Congress by the Senate. That was Owen and Pickering, who have been renominated. Now, the Judiciary Committee is now under Republican control. There are, the Senate had considered filibustering, there is two filibusters going at the time right now. One is for Owen, the other is for Estrada who recently withdrew. Basically we have one going on. That is possible that Judge Pickering who was renominated, that is unprecedented in the history of this country, then Judge Carolyn Kuhl who has been filibustered by the Senate.
Based on these numbers it can be safely said that we are not stopping these from reaching the federal bench. Whatever they say about it is hogwash. They are getting through, and the Senate is just putting a little effort into stopping them. By the way, NOW was one of the first organizations way back that used the word filibuster to stop some of these people. It has become fashionable, which is really great. That is how we make progress. But some notable right wingers already appointed to the bench are people like Jeffrey Sutton, who has worked diligently as an attorney to severely limit federal protection against discrimination based on age, race, sex, and religion.
Another one that was appointed Smith who called the violence against women a needless law since there was no national problem with violence against women, and he was the one who belonged to an all-male exclusionary country club. Now we have now before us nominated to the DC District Justice Janice Rogers Brown who will limit recourse to people with disabilities who are the victims of discrimination in more than one instance. So she is supposed to get a hearing.
All of these people are proponents of state rights, federalism, and that means that they work to limit the power of Congress to require compliance with the federal civil rights laws and protection, such as the ADA, the Family Medical Leave Act, and others. That is the landscape today. So what can we do? How can we stop this? Well, last night we had a board meeting. People were talking about all the horrible things happening. I said, give me a gun, I just want to finish this now and shoot myself, just take me away, this is so overwhelming.
But we have to keep on working and keep on fighting this. The best way to get involved and to let our senators know how you feel about this, there is something called advice and consent. The president nominates, the Senate confirms. That's their duty.
The second best way is to make changes in 2004 both in the Senate and in the White House so that this doesn't continue. Then we have to ask the U.S. Senate to block nominees who are not committed to upholding the civil rights of all and to uphold current constitutional protections.
We have to hold their feet to the fire. We have to do that. They don't have to confirm all these people. There is something called a filibuster, and it is not -- the Republicans don't have the numbers to break that. The constitution grants the Senate a co-equal role with the president in appointing federal judges. It is the constitutional obligation of the Senate to hold judicial standards subject to the highest scrutiny, examining each nominee's record carefully, including unpublished opinions. We have a few more months before the next presidential election, and this is a 501(c)(3) operation so I won't be too political. But the civil rights community, all of us, must come together to educate the public about the risks to our civil rights. We cannot -- the only thing we have, we are not funded by major foundations, the progressive community doesn't have money. We are funded by ourselves for the most part.
We must come together because the only thing we have is people power. That is the only thing we have, and the power of protest, and the power of the ballot box. Still, I saw a bumper sticker that said Bush Cheney in 04 may be the last vote you ever cast. So we must come together and put a stop and not allow our government to continue on this path. As some of you know, we have a major mobilization coming up April 25, 2004. We are calling it the march to save women's lives. This is the beginning of the rebirth of the movement back to the streets of this country, major movements have been made there.
We need to go back. We need to go back to tell people that we will not allow this to happen, that we have worked too hard, and we are not going to leave like Carol Moseley Braun says this world in a worse shape than we found it. I am so glad we are here together so we can continue on this battle and work together for justice for all. Thank you very much. (applause)
(Ms. Ortoleva) - Thank you very much, Olga. I remember a phone call that I had with Olga just after she had been one of the instrumental people who was successful in stopping Pickering the first time. She was so exhilarated and so excited. I am sure in terms of her personal energy it must have been so infuriating when he was renominated, it must have been so infuriating after all that hard work. It is just one of those examples of the many battles that we seem to be fighting all over again.
But I just wanted to make a couple of housekeeping announcements. There has been some difficulty or rearranging, shall we say, of some of the room assignments for the sessions that will follow this one, and so after Jim speaks we will have some announcements about the changes of some of the rooms just so you can get prepared for that.
I just also wanted to remind everybody that it is now policy and I am sure AAPD policy that meetings and conferences are scent free, so please refrain from using and wearing scented products, including soaps and perfumes and things of that sort. Our next speaker is James Dickson. He is the vice president for governmental relations for the American Association of People with Disabilities.
Jim has been an activist and work incessantly in various arenas on voting rights and voting access. Jim Dickson will give us a presentation on voting access which will indeed be a great follow-through on Olga's directive to all of us to get out and vote early and often.
(Mr. Dickson) - I am a little sorry the Cubs lost, too, but my dog is named Yankee, and as someone who grew up in Boston, I was not surprised and I was a little pleased that the Red Sox again imploded. They played a very good game. But people always want to know why am I a Yankees fan if I grew up in Boston. I think it is for three reasons. First, I have been blind since I was 7, and the only books that I could read for years were very limited talking book program, and the only books about baseball happened to be about the Yankees, so there is a little disability connection there. Second, I was forced to be a Yankees fan. That's good, that's good.
The second reason is I have always been a little bit of a contrarian. The third reason is I decided that I would spend my life making this world better, and that means as all of you have found that we often face many, many defeats and relatively few victories, and so I concluded that at least in one part of my life called baseball I would be with a winner. I think that actually in spite of the bleakness around us, we live in a remarkable time and we are making history, we are making the world better.
Let's look at the world as it is and not look at the world the way we want it to be. If we look at the world as the way it is, we will make the world the way we want it to be. There are really only two forms of power in this country. There is money and there is people, organized people. We don't have the money and we are up against incredible wealth. It amazes me when we have a debate that says we cannot afford day care, health care, civil rights. This is the wealthiest country in the world, and there is more money here, there is enough money here to do everything and do it right. (applause)
The Bush tax cuts in California, how many of you got a refund? Somebody help me. A third of the room? Hardly anyone. In California there were two million people whose refund check was $93,000. Two million. Auditors talked about the plan to shift power and end this democracy, and it is a plan and it is a plot, and it will fail at the ending this democracy. In 1972 half of all Americans paid no federal income tax. If a family was at the median income, they paid essentially no federal taxes.
That means that the wealthy, the upper middle class paid. 1972. So what we have seen besides the attack on civil rights is an incredible shift of the tax burden from the wealthy, from those who have and who should give according to their abilities to the middle class, which has created an angst and some negativity towards government. One of the things that we have also seen during this time period is a steady reduction in the number of people who vote in a percentage of our population, and those two facts, the shift of taxes off the rich, the squeezing of governmental treasuries, and the reduction in the number of people who vote are related. It is causal.
Abraham Lincoln said that there has really only been one problem solved throughout all human history -- how do you prevent a few men from saying to the rest of humanity, you will work by the sweat of your brow, you will make bread, and we the few shall eat it. This is a very exciting gathering because we can learn a lot from the two wonderful and successful movements.
I want to talk for just a few minutes about voting and about how that has shaped our two different perspectives, from the women's movement and the disability movement. The initial drive around which the women's movement was first organized was to obtain the right to vote. It was the suffragettes, and it took in this country decades and decades and decades to win. But that undergird is integral to the thinking of the women's movement.
We shall vote, we will vote. As Marca said, for those of us with disabilities, very often the issue has been how can we get there, how do we get in? So voting is not part of our psyche, it is not part of the disability movement culture. There is some incredibly revealing facts about voting and how it works in this country. Who are the two most identifiable elements amongst those who do not vote? It is people with disabilities and it is low and moderate-income women. Three out of four children in this country live in a household where the parents do not vote, three out of four.
Is there any wonder that our public education system is squeezed, is broke, is broken? Of the roughly hundred million Americans who didn't vote in the 2000 presidential election, 25 million are people with disabilities, 25 million.
We just, the Congress just passed the Help America Vote Act. It is a mixed blessing. There are very good things in it. But the reason we got it passed was the country's realization that our -- the nuts and bolts of our electoral system are broken. We cannot accurately count votes. We can count pennies and get it accurate, but our election system accurately can count votes provided the margin between the winner and the loser is more than 2 percent. When you get down to 2 percent, we cannot count accurately.
It wasn't just Florida in 2000. In the state of Illinois, 19 percent of every voter who went into the voting booth put a ballot in the ballot box, 19 percent of them did not have their votes counted. One out of five. Across the entire country in 2000 there were two million people who went into the voting booth and their votes did not register because the apparatus was faulty. And we have not fixed that broken apparatus.
And it is not going to be fixed by 2004. It is probably, in spite of all the federal money, and some very strong mandates, it is not going to be fixed by 2006. It will probably start to be fixed in 2008. What does this mean? It means it is incumbent on us to increase the turnout of people with disabilities and of low and moderate income women. (applause)
And that will take hard, tedious, and repetitive work. But it is doable. Later this afternoon you are going to hear from a young emerging leader, Kelly Anthony, who in the state of Missouri, I get choked up because this is so important, in the state of Missouri Kelly and her coalition increased the turnout of people with disabilities by 16 percent, and we outvoted the able-bodied by 11 percent. 71 percent voted. (applause)
The courts follow election results. It has been true throughout our history. We get people who do not vote to the polls by a very simple mechanism. We ask them, "Will you vote?" Are you going to vote? It needs to be short and sweet, it is not a lecture. It needs to be individual. Those of us who vote, vote because our families, our peers encourage them. Think about your own background.
That means that lists have to be developed. All voting turnout is based on lists of people you want to get to the polls. You have to build the lists, creating a list of low-income women or mothers with children who are going to vote is essential. We in the disability community have the lists of people with disabilities. They reside in the non-profit agencies that provide service to us.
When Congress created the 501(c)(3) tax exemption for charities, one of its motivating factors was in fact get people to vote and we'll give you a tax exemption. Focus on those constituencies which are underrepresented and underparticipate. This is one of the underpinnings of the law that created the tax exemption.
There is this myth amongst many disability 501(c)(3)s that because they are a tax-exempt organization they cannot work on voting. It is just wrong. Like all big lies, it is the exact opposite of the truth. All the agency with a disability list has to do is keep the invitation to vote, the question do you want to register to vote linked to issues that you already work on.
If you want an idea that is the individual with disabilities with education act fully funded, vote. If you want medical prescriptions, vote. If you want to stop forcing people with disabilities into nursing homes, vote. Whatever the issue you are already working on, one of the things that Olga's presentation reminded me of is what was it that the right wing used to add millions of new people to the polls. When I started working in elections 25 years ago, Christian conservatives took pride in the fact that they did not vote.
In fact, for many of them it was an article of their religious faith that they do not vote. Think about that. Now we have just the Jehovah's Witnesses primarily who say they do not vote. All the other major Christian elements vote and are mobilized because they are asked to vote because they have through the congregations lists of voters and the request to vote is individualized, and throughout the culture of that segment of society, voting is talked about every day.
It is part of their identity. We in the disability community, we have made incredible progress. When I went blind at the age of 7, they put me into a segregated school. The first day the teacher said to me, "You are blind, you are going to be a burden on society." Those were her exact words. She then went on to say, "But I can teach you how to not be a burden on society.
I am going to teach you to cane chairs." For an hour every day I was supposed to learn how to cane chairs. I am the grandson of immigrants. I was told from my earliest days I was going to go to college. My grandparents, my grandmothers could not read, and they were going to be damned if I wasn't going to go to college.
Then I went blind, and Miss Hayes says she is going to teach me how to cane chairs. I don't know how the strength came, where it came from, but for one solid year I refused to put one piece of cane through one hole. It actually got entertaining because it freaked out the teachers. They would squirm.
First they would pull me aside to talk to me. Then they would try to bribe me. Then they would try to lecture me. They got boring some of the time. But watching the reaction to what was a refusal to say, "I am not going to do this, you cannot make me do this," that is a powerful tool. It's also powerful when we get our colleagues, our sisters to vote. There was a woman who I first started organizing with in Rhode Island a long time ago. She had been an abused child. She had finally left an abusive marriage, she had psychiatric disabilities. She had been active in the organization for ten years.
I had seen her get in the face of the governor. She wasn't afraid to talk to the press, she was articulate on issues, but she had never voted. We did a voting campaign. She said, "Jim, I need you to go with me to the polls." This woman who I had seen arouse crowds of 300 was trembling as she went to vote. It was an intimidating process for her, no one had taught her how to vote. But when she came out, she said, "I'm as good as any governor" , and that is true. Our task is to get all the women like her to vote.
That doesn't mean just, yes, the issues matter, yes we teach them around the issues, but we also have to teach them how the apparatus works. We have to teach them what the ballot is going to look like, we have to get them to the polls, we have to get them registered, and that requires asking people to register, and that requires asking people to vote. There are two things that I want to end with. First there is a major threat to the Help America Vote Act, to fixing our Nation's broken voting system. Two million people didn't get their votes counted.
Almost all of those two million, all but about 50 or 80,000 were voting on paper, be it punch card or be it optical scanner. There is this attack on accessible machines, the Help America Voting Act applies one accessible machine in every polling place, that is a place where I will put earphones on and hear the ballot, make my choice. It is a computer.
There is this attack which makes sense on the surface that says we can't trust computers so we've got to have a voter verified paper ballot. The voter needs to see and touch a piece of paper. That piece of paper is not going to be accessible, but that piece of paper is also the piece of paper that makes it easier to steal elections.
We also have dimples and hanging chads. You cannot accurately count paper. How many times have you had a stack you tried to count? What the undergirding reason for saying we must have a voter-verified paper ballot is to keep the broken system in place because machines that are accessible to me and that would print out a paper ballot do not exist, cannot legally be used in this country. I know it is counterintuitive to say there is something wrong with a ballot where the person can see it and touch it and be sure that it's counted accurately, but paper is much more easily manipulated.
Remember what you saw during Florida's recounts. Within the disability community, we must change our culture. Voting needs to be as common a word as "I have a right." Access stems from voting. Our newsletters need to talk about it, our voice mails need to end with register and vote, our E-mails need to say, "I vote," on the end as you sign off, but most importantly we have to begin now to build the lists, to put the lists in order so that we can phone bank them, and we can turn out voters with disabilities.
It is doable, it has been done in Missouri. If you can do it in Missouri, you can do it anywhere. I am going to, to keep us on time -- it is too late? I am going to just end by paraphrasing something that Frederick Douglass said, "Those who want change without struggle are like farmers who want to grow crops without tearing up the soil." Those who want change without struggle are like those who expect lightning without the thunder's awful roar. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has and it never will. Register and vote. Thank you. (applause)
(Ms. Ortoleva) - I am going to go into New York mode now and talk really fast. Wait a minute, wait a minute, slow down. You're taking the microphone with you.
(Mr. Dickson) - See, I didn't want to give up the microphone.
(Ms. Ortoleva) - We are going to move now into our workshop sessions and we are going to announce where these are going to be taking place because as we said, they are not following your program. Also I just wanted to note quickly that we have afforded an opportunity if people want to have caucuses of particular groups of people who might want to talk about specific issues and coalition, at the end of the session this afternoon and before the evening sessions begin. If you are interested in doing that and want a non-stop, 24-hour a day conference, you need to sign up for them personally with Bonnie Rice if you want to get together with other people.
Just to let you know, three of the morning sessions do not list how the hotel set it up. If you were planning to go to the "Voting For Our Lives" workshop, that is now in the Susquehanna Room, if you're going to the Challenges on Public Policy About Women With Disabilities in Later Life, that is in the Congressional Room. Judiciary Room continues to be the site for Equality in the Workplace. All four of those meeting rooms are upstairs. The only way to get there is in the elevator. We will have staff and volunteers helping to guide people as you get there.
Can you repeat that?
Most definitely. Also the leader boards for the hotels are correct. Let me do it again. Voting for our lives will be in the Susquehanna Room, Building Coalitions For Women With Disabilities in the Potomac Room, Challenges of and Public Policy About Women With Disabilities in Later Life, Congressional Room. If you look at your watches, you know we are really seriously behind schedule. Do not leave the workshops. Stay and enjoy the complete workshops, enjoy everything that is going to be said.
We are going to push the lunch back a little bit. Once we all convene back here for lunch, food service will begin, and the speakers will not begin immediately. So please stay in the rooms and enjoy everything you are going to hear for the next hour to hour and a half. Get back here between 12:15 and 12:30. We will start the food service.
Speaking will not start until closer to 1:00. At lunchtime we will also make announcements regarding room locations for the afternoon sessions. When you come back also please enjoy the information that is on the info tables in the back of the room. Thanks.
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