I thought some enduring forms of traditional ignorance had died out due to a lack of oxygen. But I guess I was wrong.
Last month, Rick Morrow, pastor of Beulah Church, a Baptist church in Richland, Missouri, said from his pulpit that autism was an example of demonic possession and that the best thing to do about it is “just cast the demon out.”
That statement is so profoundly ignorant that it’s dangerous. First of all, it’s factually wrong. Anybody can perform any kind of hocus pocus exorcism that they want over a person with autism. That person is still going to be autistic. There is no demon to be cast out.
Secondly, his view is just plain stupid. It’s the kind of stupidity that masquerades as authority, which is the most dangerous kind. When someone like Morrow preaches to the flock, they are supposed to be conveying the word of God, whom they consider to be the greatest authority of all.
This is the sort of simpleton’s worldview that has turned me and so many disabled people I know completely off to organized religion. We’ve heard about people who are brazenly religious saying that God gives some people disabilities because he’s trying to prevent us from doing something evil in the future. We’ve seen the crass ceremonies of the crackpot faith healers. We’ve read about the Biblical beggars. All these representations depict disabled folks as people who need to be fixed. The assumption is that to be who we are is to be tragically flawed. We have nothing to offer in our current form except a sobering lesson of what not to be. This is supposed to be the word of God.
This is the sort of simpleton’s worldview that has turned me and so many disabled people I know completely off to organized religion.
It’s no wonder that disabled folks frequently butt heads with similarly dismissive political attitudes that consider it to be a waste to make the world accessible for us because we have nothing to offer. We are just burdens. If we don’t fit into the world as it is presently constructed, then we must be altered and reconfigured until we do fit. No one has any obligation to accommodate us.
I naïvely thought that the type of religion-inspired, abject stupidity about disability exhibited by Morrow was a thing of the past, but it seems one good thing has come out of this, anyway. Morrow has been thoroughly excoriated on the Internet for what he said.
At the time he said it, Morrow was also a member of the Stoutland school board. A change.org petition was circulated online calling for Morrow to be removed from that position for his ridiculous assessment of autistic people.
Morrow resigned from the school board on September 13. The Stoutland school district said in a statement, “One member of the Board of Education does not speak for the Board of Education as a whole, nor the District itself.”
So at least that particular school board is now considerably less ignorant.