Free Republic

Who wouldn’t support a treaty with the language in its title that says it is for “Rights of Persons with Disabilities”? Turns out many Republicans oppose the U.N.’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and their reasons are worth taking a look at again, even if the arguments are not necessarily new. The Senate discussed the U.N.’s CRPD, which was completed in 2006, last week. Republicans held to their objection for taking up an international treaty during a lame-duck session of Congress, but debate for it will be on the floor Tuesday. As Betsy Woodruff for National...

Who wouldn’t support a treaty with the language in its title that says it is for “Rights of Persons with Disabilities”? Turns out many Republicans oppose the U.N.’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and their reasons are worth taking a look at again, even if the arguments are not necessarily new. The Senate discussed the U.N.’s CRPD, which was completed in 2006, last week. Republicans held to their objection for taking up an international treaty during a lame-duck session of Congress, but debate for it will be on the floor Tuesday. As Betsy Woodruff for National...

Rights: The Senate is considering a treaty which says "disability is an evolving concept" and which would infringe on U.S. sovereignty and the right to raise our children as American families see fit. Those who thought that the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) adequately guaranteed the rights of the handicapped to have access to all facets of American life were apparently wrong. The U.S. Senate is considering ratifying the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which President Obama signed in 2009 and which goes well beyond mandating wheel-chair ramps for public buildings. CRPD doesn't even bother to...

Rights: The Senate is considering a treaty which says "disability is an evolving concept" and which would infringe on U.S. sovereignty and the right to raise our children as American families see fit. Those who thought that the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) adequately guaranteed the rights of the handicapped to have access to all facets of American life were apparently wrong. The U.S. Senate is considering ratifying the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which President Obama signed in 2009 and which goes well beyond mandating wheel-chair ramps for public buildings. CRPD doesn't even bother to...

There may actually be some good news coming out of academia. “This really is a profession that has run amok,” Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic said of psychiatrists in a recent interview with Celeste McGovern which appeared in Citizen magazine. “People are beginning to question its legitimacy and they are beginning to mistrust its values, its diagnoses and its treatments.” McGovern writes that, “Even medical students are avoiding it, he adds, as the average age of psychiatrists is now 57.” Citizen is published by Focus on the Family. McGovern is based in the United Kingdom. “Every day...

Via e-mail today July 25, 2012 Senate Committee Vote Today on UN Treaty—Keep Calling! Michael Farris is founder and chairman of Homeschooling Legal Defense Assocation HSLDA, and homeschooling father of 10. Dear HSLDA Members and Friends: After a brief postponement the U.S. Senate has decided to continue to push forward the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and has scheduled a mark-up and committee vote for tomorrow. As we have mentioned in previous updates, HSLDA believes that this treaty, while sounding good in name, could become a tool to restrict our rights as citizens and...

Back door attempt at gun control in UN CRPD treaty?

The United Nations in collusion with Obama's globalists has cooked up another scheme to slice off a piece of U.S. sovereignty and put us under global government. The plan is to stampede the Senate into ratifying the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, CRPD. This particular piece of globalist mischief had been unnoticed since President Obama ordered U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to sign this treaty on July 30, 2009. Now he is trying to ram it through to ratification. The notion that the U.N. can provide more benefits or protections for persons with disabilities than the U.S....

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) is delaying Senate consideration of the United Nations treaty on people with disabilities amid growing opposition from home-schooling advocates. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was scheduled to take up the U.N. Convention on the Rights of People With Disabilities on Thursday, with the goal of getting it passed in time for the 22nd anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) on July 26. Instead, Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) announced that he will hold the markup next Thursday, July 26. A spokesman for DeMint said several Republicans on the committee joined him in asking for the...

Senator John Kerry announced yesterday that he plans to pass the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities before July 26—just 13 days from today. He has scheduled a formal committee vote next Thursday—July 19. This is an unprecedented attempt to jam a binding international treaty through the Senate without proper time for debate or consideration.

Digital Eye Glass I believe that Digital Eye Glass will ultimately replace glasses, and will help many people see better, and improve the quality of their lives through Augmediated Reality. Personal introduction I wear a computer vision system, and carry a letter from my family physician, as well as documentation on this system when I travel. I have worn a computer vision system of some kind for 34 years, and am the inventor of the technology that I wear and use in my day-to-day life. Although it has varied over the last 34 years, I have worn the present embodiment...

As the executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition I have had the opportunity to read stories of despair and other stories of hope. The story that I am writing about today is one of the greatest stories of hope. This is the story of Lilliana Dennis, a child who is living with Trisomy 18, a rare genetic condition that many doctors have labelled as "incompatible with life." This is a story of a child who was not supposed to live. A child who has a condition that most doctors would refuse to provide treatment for and let to die,...

While one woman’s video about her decision to reject an abortion of her disabled son is resonating with millions of views, another mother tells a British newspaper that, upon finding out her son would have disabilities, she “knew” she had to abort him.Sara Carpenter writes at the London Daily Mail newspaper, “I saw my son’s bleak future and knew I had to abort him.” Feeling my unborn son move inside me should have been a joyous moment midway through my pregnancy — a milestone that took me closer to welcoming my third child into the world. Instead, every tiny movement...

The book by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, Die Freigabe der Venrichtung lebensunwerten Lebens (allowing the destruction of life unworthy of living) which came out in Germany in 1920 has at last been translated into Italian (in English it is: Permitting the Destruction of Unworthy Life: Its Extent and Form, translated by W.E. Wright, in Issues in Law and Medicine 1992, 8:231-265). I say “at last”, because this is a text that marks a watershed. It has inspired many important reflections that are only partially explained in the introduction on 19th-century history – very concentrated at the legal level –...

Reading through the Slate article: Rick Santorum, Meet My Son, I find myself torn. As another mom in the trenches, I can genuinely feel her love for her son, and the agony of watching him suffer. She is in the battle, and in the battle, sometimes all we can feel is the battle. Also, though, I wish we could sit down for coffee and talk about who her baby is, inside. With my disabled child, I have to be mindful of two realities. One, that his brain is terribly broken; his life is often a battle between life and death,...

March 16, 2012 (LiveActionNews.org) - When you walk into Nicole and Steven’s house, you get the sense that they are parents who thoroughly enjoy their three kids. You’ll find Steven running down the narrow hallway while all the kids scream in delight, chasing each other and him. Nicole patiently fixes healthy meals for them while explaining to the youngest that she can’t climb up on the counter to help because the crockpot is just too hot for little hands. You’ll see Titus, their only son proudly popping wheelies in his special wheelchair while the family cheers. They are a family...

Many hotels are faced with making improvements to pools by Thursday or falling out of compliance with the latest accessibility laws for disabled people. Hoteliers must have pool lifts to provide disabled people equal access to pools and whirlpools, or at least have a plan in place to acquire a lift. If they don't, they face possible civil penalties of as much as $55,000. There are about 51,000 hotels, according to the American Hotel & Lodging Association, and most have pools. The lifts are required by regulations made in 2010 stemming from the Americans With Disabilities Act, a civil rights...

BERLIN, January 27, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Berlin’s “Topography of Terror,” museum, which features exhibits on the murderous crimes of German police forces during the Nazi era, has begun a temporary display on the thousands of children euthanized during the same period as “life unworthy of life.” The exhibition, entitled “In memory of the children. Pediatricians and crimes against children in the Nazi period,” displays photos and documents related to various Nazi projects concerning the murder and torture of children, such as Action T4 and Lebensborn. While Action T4 focused on exterminating children who were physically or mentally handicapped, Lebensborn...

Greek disabled groups are angry at a government decision to expand a list of state-recognized disability categories to include pedophiles, exhibitionists and kleptomaniacs. But the Labor Ministry on Monday said categories added to the expanded list — that also includes pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists and sadomasochists — were included for purposes of medical assessment and used as a gauge for allocating financial assistance.

The perils of the social devaluation of people include legal assisted suicide and euthanasia It is not uncommon to hear people without disabilities and people who have recently acquired a disability say they would rather be dead than disabled. Although politically incorrect, embedded perceptions that life with disability is full of suffering and indignity promote the idea that it's a death sentence. Able-ist social conditioning equates disability with pain, frailty, incapacity, and poor quality of life. It views persons with disabilities as problems that need to be fixed. The 'problem' of disability I would argue the "problem" of disability...