I’m pretty crappy at making political predictions. Three years ago, I predicted with cocksure confidence that there wasn’t the slimmest chance in hell that the squatter currently occupying the White House would ever become the squatter currently occupying the White House. Shows how much I know.
But once in a great while, when it comes to political predictions, I’m a regular Nostradamus. Some times there are situations where the outcome is so predictable, even I can see it coming.
Like, for instance, once I was shopping in the men’s section of a department store. There were super patriotic T-shirts hanging all around me. They said stuff on the front like “God Bless America” and “Made in the USA.” They had pictures of badass eagles, American flags, the Declaration of Independence, and stuff like that.
I immediately wanted to see the labels inside the collars of the shirts because I was 10,000 percent positive that I knew exactly what they would say. But first I made a wager with my imaginary friend. I bet him my condo to a ham sandwich that the T-shirt labels would say exactly what I predicted. And, of course, he took me up on it. Whenever I need a sucker to engage in a foolhardy wager, my imaginary friend is happy to oblige. And when I gloat about winning, he never gets upset. When I lose, he never makes me pay up. He always gives me double or nothing. Isn’t that what imaginary friends are for?
When we bet, we seal the deal by hooking our pinkie fingers. So once the bet was officially placed, I looked at the labels and sure enough they said: “Made in Guatemala.” Exactly as I predicted! I knew it because making super patriotic T-shirts in Guatemala makes perfect sense, in a perfectly nonsensical way.
Another time I nailed a slam-dunk political prediction was when an invitation to sign an online petition landed in my inbox. It came from lifepetitions.com. The petition was to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the demand was that the commission take action to help stop all the aborting of fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome.
I suspected this petition came my way because I write a lot about disability stuff and some algorithm pegged me as a likely sympathizer. But I was sure that if I went to lifepetitions.com, it would be disturbingly rightwing. So I woke up my imaginary friend. I shook him hard because he was passed out in his hammock. I showed him the petition link and told him my theory. “Wanna bet?” I said, holding up my pinkie. He just hooked my pinkie, rolled over, and went back to sleep.
My prediction was spot on! The petition cited an alarmingly high number of pregnancies that are terminated every year after the fetus is diagnosed with Down syndrome. The petition said, “In a world which keeps telling us that we need to be more inclusive, this petition tells the U.N. to help stop eugenic abortion on the grounds of Down syndrome or other hereditary genetic conditions.”
It called on the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to “pass resolutions to amend the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to expressly work to change the perception and laws in member countries on this issue.”
There are a lot of other lifepetitions, including one titled, “Tell U.S. libraries to stop pushing ‘drag queens’ on our kids!” It demands that the American Library Association stop promoting Drag Queen Story Hour, where drag queens read stories to children in libraries, schools, and bookstores. According to the Drag Queen Story Hour website, this exercise “captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.”
This lifepetition says Drag Queen Story Hour “is responsible for corrupting children with perverse notions of human nature.”
Lifepetitions.com is owned and operated by lifesitenews.com, which claims to be “the #1 pro-life news website.” I clicked the site’s opinion tab and saw headlines like “Climate doomsday predictions prove to be ‘fake news’ every time. Why does mainstream peddle it?” and “10 ways to take control of your kid’s education and stop leftist indoctrination.” (Way #2 is to abolish teachers’ unions.)
The proprietors of this site shove the word “life” in your face as if they own the copyright on it. Folks of this political persuasion, in my experience, come out as staunch disability rights activists only when it comes to this issue.
Remember that infamous Indiana law signed by then-Governor Mike Pence in 2016 that banned abortions sought because the fetus has Down syndrome or other disabilities? It was blocked by the courts and never went into effect. Other state legislatures have passed and/or failed to pass similar laws. The only ones currently in effect are in North Dakota and Missouri.
This kind of posturing reminds me of right-to-work rhetoric. Suddenly the rights of workers matter when it comes to making it harder for them to organize. I mean, am I supposed to believe that Mike Pence is a disability rights champion? Really?
The sad part is, the people concerned about abortions due to a Down syndrome diagnosis have a point. It’s hard to find recent, reliable statistics as to how often this happens, but it happens. Women often make their decision based on advice from doctors, who are notoriously poor judges of the future quality of life of disabled people.
A great deal of honest public debate is needed to ensure the woman’s decision is adequately informed. It’s too bad this message is lost when the messenger has such dubious credibility.
The next time I bet my imaginary friend was when a link landed in my inbox urging me to click to view a video of a doctor discussing how health insurers wouldn’t cover life-saving treatments for his patients but instead recommended assisted suicide.
I was sure two things would happen if I clicked: 1) the video would be the product of a rightwing site and 2) it would decry how state-assisted suicide laws victimize disabled people.
This time my imaginary friend was playing tennis. It was his day off. When he saw me on the other side of the chain-link fence frantically waving my arms to get his attention, he called timeout, hustled over, and hooked my pinky without even asking what the bet was about before hustling back to the court.
And, of course, the video was produced by the Daily Signal, the propaganda vessel of the Heritage Foundation. In it, a doctor from Nevada tells how insurance directors in California and Oregon, states where physician-assisted suicide is legal, told him life-saving treatments for two of his patients who weren’t terminally ill wouldn’t be covered and suggested assisted suicide instead. The doctor laments people who aren’t terminally ill, such as “the disabled, the depressed, the poor and marginalized, being forced down this road because they’re going to be denied treatment by insurance companies.”
I very much agree with the doctor. I think the “freedom of choice” and “death with dignity” terms, in which the assisted suicide debate is usually framed, are lethally simple-minded. Not Dead Yet, a “national, grassroots disability rights group that opposes legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia as deadly forms of discrimination,” says it best on its website:
“In a society that prizes physical ability and stigmatizes impairments, it’s no surprise that previously able-bodied people may tend to equate disability with loss of dignity. This reflects the prevalent but insulting societal judgment that people who deal with incontinence and other losses in bodily function are lacking dignity.”
Thus, the group says, people often seek and receive assisted suicide not because they are in unbearable pain but because they fear the perceived humiliation of being disabled. This attitude is used to rationalize denying disabled people not just medical treatment but also public services, such as in-home assistance, that could greatly increase their quality of life and make hastening death less appealing.
When health care decisions are based on maximizing private profits, disabled people are naturally screwed.
Not Dead Yet says, “Legalized assisted suicide sets up a double standard: some people get suicide prevention while others get suicide assistance, and the difference between the two groups is the health status of the individual.”
Yet perversely, this discrimination is bolstered by the hardcore libertarianism that is essential to the Heritage Foundation. The group’s position statement on health care reform, for instance, calls Medicare and Medicaid “Washington meddling” and the Affordable Care Act the “mother of all meddling.” Heritage pines for the advent of some mythical, purely profit-driven health care delivery system where insurance companies trip all over each other to make sure they give us everything we need to be healthy.
But when health care decisions are based on maximizing private profits, disabled people are naturally screwed. We’re a major threat to those profits with our expensive medical needs and inclination toward poverty. The incentive is powerful to deny us and take the easy way out by offering us the “choice” of assisted suicide. The cavalier callousness the doctor complains about in the video is an indispensable element of the Heritage Foundation’s worldview.
Maybe I have a certain talent not so much for making political predictions but for smelling rightwing hypocrisy. It really isn’t hard to do. The stench is often overwhelming.