Disability Communities Defending Democracy (DCDD) is very concerned by a “slip opinion” the Department of Justice put out today. The Department of Justice is part of the U.S. federal government.
A slip opinion is an opinion on the law. It is not a law itself. The slip opinion is about the “integration mandate” in Olmstead. Olmstead was a court case that said forcing people into institutions is discrimination. It also said it is not legal for states to do this because of federal disability rights laws.
The integration mandate is an important tool that keeps people with disabilities in the community. The right to be in the community is foundational to a truly inclusive democracy. This opinion says the integration mandate is against the law.
Disability Communities Defending Democracy is a new organization based in the Pacific Northwest. We empower disability communities to defend inclusive democracy and our communities from anti-democracy groups, movements, and narratives.
The opinion lies about homeless people and deinstitutionalization. Deinstitutionalization was a process where many people with disabilities forced into institutions instead lived in the community. It says deinstitutionalization caused homelessness. This is not true.
It also says that forcing people into institutions is not discrimination. This is not true. This opinion is bad. It can hurt people with disabilities. It can especially hurt homeless people with disabilities. It is bad for democracy. You can read the slip opinion here: https://www.justice.gov/olc/media/1446701/dl
DCDD’s Executive Director talked more about the how anti-democracy movements target homeless people with disabilities in this interview. This is part of that interview.
“Fascist Eugenics and Persecution of the Homeless
Braune: I wonder what other trends you are seeing with fascism and disability that people might not know about. One of the things that comes to mind for me is homelessness. I think I had a discussion with you at one point where you mentioned the ugly laws, in reference to Louisiana now trying to incarcerate people for being homeless. I don’t know if you have more thoughts on that.
Warwick: We’ve been in bad moments on disability before. The rise of institutionalization was a project. That was done to professionalize the segregation of disabled people from everyday life. Later, that was tied with the eugenics movement, to segregate disabled people, so that we could not pass on our “bad genes,” and that was intimately tied with forced sterilization and forced labor, which were also an issue in these institutions. They were horrible for people and billed as the correct place for disabled people to be.
The “ugly laws” came about during a sort of national panic about disability and about disability fakerism, particularly among homeless people. This was right after the Civil War. A lot of people were freshly disabled from the war, and industrialization created new disability experiences—which is a great euphemism for, people got their arms caught in the cotton mill and they couldn’t work anymore, or they were blinded by a mining accident, or something of that nature. So, you had a lot of people begging on the streets, and many of them claimed to be Civil War veterans, because there were a lot of disabled Civil War veterans at the time. The upper middle class wanted to instill order. There was also this panic around gender and sexuality that was coming about in these cities, particularly in San Francisco, where the first ugly law was created in 1867. It’s a very similar type of situation as now, where there’s all these panics about gender, sexuality, race, and so on.
Disability Communities Defending Democracy 