Journalist – Historian – Speaker
1) A man in PA killed his wife and daughter, then himself. “Some said they had never seen Mary Scully or her adult daughter, who was disabled.” TW: Filicide.https://t.co/CXayRz9NBW — David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) November 28, 2017 This tweet is a small thread of resources on filicide in response to a recent story from PA. …
Gizmodo reporter Jennings Brown wrote a great article, “The last of the iron lungs” last week. It’s very well done, with good interviews, a sense of the history of polio, and this: Understandably, Lillard lives in a constant state of anxiety over the functionality of her iron lung. But she said the company responsible for servicing …
The GOP tax plan is intended to limit the potential for higher education to enable class movement. The GOP tax plan is calculated not just to shift wealth upward, but also to remove some of the educational tools that make it possible for people to shift their own class status. It’s not just tuition waivers. …
I wrote about Al Franken. I don’t think I could vote for him. I’m an American citizen, a Minnesotan, and I have one vote. When I look at the ballot in 2020, I won’t use it to support Al Franken. Not now. Possibly not ever. But the GOP can shut the hell up until they …
Last April I wrote about the arrest of John Haywood, a ten year old autistic boy, who sobs as he’s taken to the police career, his mother filming it. The video went viral, as well it should, because it’s awful. I wrote: If the video shocks you, and it should, imagine how often children with …
In the endless litany of horrible things that the Trump administration is doing to disabled folks and their families, I missed this one. According to Foreign Policy, the Trump State Department is slashing funding for diplomats who have disabled children. On Thursday, Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) sent a letter to the …
It’s happening. Ohio is going to pass an anti-choice bill that criminalizes speech between a woman and her doctor. I wrote about the ban here. Kasich will surely sign it. I’m pretty livid. This won’t help people with Down syndrome. It’s not intended to. It just keeps spreading stigma on the one hand, while serving as a …
My latest in The Nation: Mostly buried beneath early November’s onslaught of news, stories from Oklahoma, Iowa, and Maine reveal the ways that state governments, through both apparent incompetence and maliciousness, are failing disabled residents and their families. In the first two examples, disability programs are being cut as a result of self-imposed budget crises. …
This is an incredible article on, as they were called at the time, “McNamara’s Morons,” people with intellectual disabilities drafted into the Vietnam War. One morning in the summer of 1967, I was among about 100 men at the Armed Forces induction center in Nashville. It was the height of the Vietnam War, and I …
Dominant Narrative: Conservative students on liberal campuses are ostracized and marginalized and it isn’t fair and there should be balance. Data: Conservative students at UW Madison are doing fine. Politically conservative students instead were more likely to report feeling safe, respected and like they belong than students holding other political views. Conservative students also were …