Romantic Acceptance

Picture from the New York Times.

Mentally handicapped individuals face a truly difficult barrier in effecting change regarding their status or circumstances: relatively few are capable of advocating for themselves, or understanding what changes
should be made and how to make them. This voicelessness has contributed to allowing mentally handicapped people to be treated despicably in the past, when they were packed into institutions, abused, and viewed as sub-human. Horrific stories abound from this treatment- for example at one typical school of the 1960s in Massachusetts, "Conditions... were appalling for those with Down syndrome, cerebral palsy and other true physical or mental conditions. Given little treatment or training, they were often straitjacketed or tied to chairs and left soaked in urine and feces."

Workers were not equipped to deal with their mentally handicapped clients, and a sad marriage of cruelty and power, rather than empathy and understanding, dictated the way in which these institutions were run. This same phenomenon was famously distilled in a simple classroom exercise of separating out the blue-eyed from the brown-eyed kids to demonstrate racial prejudice:

That spring morning 37 years ago, the blue-eyed children were set apart from the children with brown or green eyes. Elliott pulled out green construction paper armbands and asked each of the blue-eyed kids to wear one. “The browneyed people are the better people in this room,” Elliott began. “They are cleaner and they are smarter.”

She knew that the children weren’t going to buy her pitch unless she came up with a reason, and the more scientific to these Space Age children of the 1960s, the better. “Eye color, hair color and skin color are caused by a chemical,” Elliott went on, writing MELANIN on the blackboard. Melanin, she said, is what causes intelligence. The more melanin, the darker the person’s eyes—and the smarter the person. “Brown-eyed people have more of that chemical in their eyes, so brown-eyed people are better than those with blue eyes,” Elliott said. “Blue-eyed people sit around and do nothing. You give them something nice and they just wreck it.” She could feel a chasm forming between the two groups of students.

I think there are some similarities between this experiment and establishing an IQ cut off point and treating all the people below as completely inferior. It is dissimiliar, in that this classification is not arbitrary, but there is a likeness concerning the notions of power. Establishing this IQ point demarcates those below as those without power, just as the blueeyed children were, and just as the guards were in the Stanford Prison Experiment.

As changes in the way mentally handicapped people are treated shows, their abilities lie on a spectrum and not solely on the other side of an IQ boundary (or precipice, as it was once considered). This type of more inclusive thinking has quickly and radically changed the perspective on mentally handicapped people, and the circumstances provided for them to live their lives. Now developmentally disabled people are provided with assistance in order to live with as much independence as possible, often earning money, making their own choices, indulging in their own interests and hobbies, and attending social events with their friends. Group home residents have individualized action plans specifically designed to foster their independence and socialization, curtailed to their personality, abilities, and interests. Disability rights activists worked hard to get society to this point, and as an article printed in the Times today shows, they are now working on taking it to another step.

This article, Learning to Savor a Full Life, Love Life Included, concerns allowing mentally handicapped individuals to pursue physical romantic relationships. Educating mentally handicapped people about romantic partners, allowing them to exercise their right to have a partner, and valuing their ability to form romantic attachment, takes their rights to a logical yet impressive level of acceptance.

A generation ago, young adults like Ms. Graham and Mr. Ruvolo were generally confined to institutions, with no expectation of a normal life. All that changed in 1975, when a court order closed the notorious Willowbrook State School on Staten Island and moved its residents, and others like them across the country, into community settings to live as fully as their limitations allowed.

That could include attending neighborhood schools and holding salaried jobs. Now many men and women in their 20's and 30's, encouraged from childhood to be independent, expect the same when it comes to expressing their romantic and sexual needs.

...Far safer, Dr. Levy said, is allowing such needs to be met in the group home, after a consent evaluation by a psychologist. That evaluation tests knowledge of birth control and disease prevention, the need to limit sexual activity to private locations, the difference between legal and illegal sexual acts and how to avoid exploitive situations.