You said:

“It’s very much like honor killings. Men who have very specific, culturally endorsed ideas of who their daughters should be, and what the father’s role is in seeing this happen, find themselves in a situation of no apparent hope. I’m sure there’s many men in Jordan (for example) who find the prospect of their daughters dying quickly and quietly far more merciful than life with no prospect of decent marriage and a ruined reputation. And there’s a time and place for sympathising with men like that, to better understand what motivates them and how to keep others from arriving in the same place. But writing sympathetically about the pain and suffering of men who kill their daughters for family honor is very different in Jordan than it is in the United States. So is condemning the act as murder, and asserting the girl’s right to live regardless of what other people think of her worth, or what others would find best.”

Exactly how is “honor killing” (murder) different in Jordan than here in the United States? Isn’t murder murder? Why should it get a pass just because it happening over in Jordon and not here? How could there be a time to sympathize with the murderous father in his “honor killing”? It all sounds like a double standard to me.

The killing of anyone is murder. It’s just as wrong for a parent of a disabled child to kill that child (regardless of whatever misguided notions driving his motives) as it is for a father in Jordon to murder his daughter (via his religious/cultural notions)through the so called “honor killing”.

My point is, if it is shown that disabled people are due to the biases of the society in greater risk of being hurt or murdered than an “ordinary” person (which might very well be so), then it would make sense that punishments against such crimes would be stricter too, to make at least some of the would-be murderers reconsider.

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Also, understanding is one thing, but the idea of in any way or form offering support to the idea that some lives are simply unworthy and destroyable is disgusting.

I did not expect to see me and my son mentioned.

Keep up the good work!

Rus Cooper-Dowda

The above comment from your entry just came into my head in a particularly horrifying way that I felt like I should relay back to you (as I think it *does* mean something)…

I was writing a post on Switzerland including “mental illness” in their Euthanasia program, and went here for some fact-checking:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-4_Euthanasia_Program

One of the first things my eyes fell on was this quote:

“The idea of enforcing “racial hygiene” had been an essential element of Hitler’s ideology from its earliest days. Hitler seems to have had a lifelong horror of mental illness and physical deformity. In his discussions with Bouhler and the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Lammers, Hitler referred to people who “perpetually dirtied themselves” and who “put their own excrement in their mouths.””

At one point, I told myself a lot of stories hoping they might be true, and a lot of other stories hoping that if I believed in them enough then I might stop realizing they weren’t true. (This was a part of the ongoing effort to disappear that used to occupy a lot of my time. Shouldn’t be confused with “telling people what I thought they wanted to hear because I thought that’s what communication was for,” though, which also happened at around the same time.)

I found people divided often into two camps on that.

One camp said that I honestly believed the stories I was telling myself, and that therefore I was something called psychotic, or possibly something called dissociative (they were quite divided on which). They neglected to find any particular content in the stories, or when they did, it more often fit their imaginings than anything else.

Another camp said that I was making up the stories I was telling myself, but that I was doing this to get attention and that this could not be countenanced and that I was evil and should be dismissed at every opportunity. They neglected to see my real reasons for doing so, which had to do with a complex combination of things, and instead belittled me.

In reality, I was trying to figure out and take my place in a human-created world that seemed to have no place for me, and few descriptions of anyone like me. I was integrating things I had read in books (particularly fairy tales), descriptions other people had of how their minds work (and therefore “how a mind should be said to work” as far as I could figure out), insistence by other people on how my mind must work, assorted psychiatrized categories of experience that only partially (when at all) fit me, and so on and so forth. And I was also desperately afraid of having no future, of seeing no place I seemed to fit, and so forth. And of wondering whether I had to mold myself to a number of different “fits” that presented themselves.

And meanwhile I was also quite autistic, which meant that I acted in a way that certainly got interpreted through a number of different lenses but which nothing I attempted could turn off. (Meanwhile some people were noticing I was autistic and others were busy gawping at all the assorted other stuff going on.)

So people denied a lot of things in this process. They ended up denying some combination of:
My connection to reality.
My understanding of what was happening around me.
My awareness of the existence of other people
The role of their own psychiatric system in shaping the way I acted and thought about myself
My own agency in what was happening to me (except when I could be dismissed as “attention seeking”)
My real motivations
The influences of the people around me on what I was saying (this is one reason the idea of “facilitator influence” confuses me — yes, it happens in FC, but why doesn’t anyone talk about the fact that for many autistic people our vocalizations are easier to influence than our typing?)
Etc.

And basically everyone else got to tell my story for me, in a really bad way.

I don’t think Robert Latimer should be any more or less worthy of sympathy than any man who willfully murdered his own child. They all have reasons and stories, and something in their life that twisted and pushed them in a tragic way. But I think we need to clearly condemn the act.

It’s very much like honor killings. Men who have very specific, culturally endorsed ideas of who their daughters should be, and what the father’s role is in seeing this happen, find themselves in a situation of no apparent hope. I’m sure there’s many men in Jordan (for example) who find the prospect of their daughters dying quickly and quietly far more merciful than life with no prospect of decent marriage and a ruined reputation. And there’s a time and place for sympathising with men like that, to better understand what motivates them and how to keep others from arriving in the same place. But writing sympathetically about the pain and suffering of men who kill their daughters for family honor is very different in Jordan than it is in the United States. So is condemning the act as murder, and asserting the girl’s right to live regardless of what other people think of her worth, or what others would find best.

For disabled people, we’re in Jordan. Replace the word “honor” with the word “mercy”, and it fits appalingly well. Talking about how hard it was for Robert Latimer, and how cruel it would be to make him suffer isn’t just a plea for mercy. It’s a message to everyone out there who’s thinking of killing their disabled child. It’s telling them their urges are understandable and reasonable, and not wrong in the way wanting to kill children is wrong. It’s telling them that if they kill their child, people will be lining up to sympathize, that their circumstances are so much worse than that of every other parent that they deserve leniency for murder. It’s telling them they’re justified in deciding that their child’s better off dead. And these aren’t attitudes you want to reinforce in someone who might be standing over a sleeping child deciding wheither to put a pillow over her face.