« On this day in history…

Home
How dare the Times report a story! »

New Mobility’s “Person of the Year”: Harriet McBryde Johnson

Posted by Ampersand | January 19th, 2004

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed I’m a fan of disability rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson - I’ve blogged about her New York Times articles here and here.

(If you haven’t read Johnson’s articles, then you’re in for a treat! The first, Unspeakable Conversations, is about her Princeton debate with Peter Singer, who in disability rights circles is considered pure evil. The second, The Disability Gulag, is a critique of the American disabled care system. Both articles are funny, well-written, politically engaged, and human.)

Anyhow, New Mobility magazine has awarded Johnson their “person of the year” award. There’s a short, interesting article about Johnson, including this passage:

One public figure, Charles Colson, the Watergate crook turned born-again Christian, was critical of both Singer and Johnson on his Web site: “Ms. Johnson, obviously an able advocate, wrote that she doubted whether she had bested Singer in the exchange. The reason is that, as an atheist … she has no moral basis to refute Singer’s deadly logic so long as she embraces his premises about the origins of life. Only the Christian ideal, that all life is sacred because it is created in the image of God, provides an unassailable answer to Singer’s reasoning. It’s the only sure basis for protecting people like Harriet McBryde Johnson from a moral calculus that reduces them to non-persons.”

“Colson’s answer,” replies Johnson, “is not an answer at all, let alone an unassailable answer, unless you happen to believe in the Judeo-Christian god. I don’t. I uphold the value of life as an important foundation to building a just society, the kind of society that’s fit to live in. The idea is so useful that I don’t worry about whether it is ‘true’ in some ultimate or transcendent sense.”

The article includes the good news that she’s working on a book, to be published by Henry Holt.

| This entry was posted by Ampersand and is filed under Disabled Rights & Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “New Mobility’s “Person of the Year”: Harriet McBryde Johnson”

  1. Aaron Writes:
    January 19th, 2004 at 2:39 pm

    Ms. Johnson has a piece in the new National Lawyers Guild newsletter which comments on the difficulties she had at the recent convention in Minneapolis.

    Johnson’s appearance at Princeton shows up Singer - even though Johnson is physically debilitated, her mind functions well, as shown by the article and the NLG Guild Notes article.

    Singer ignores that there *can* be bright-line rules drawn between abortion and infanticide (society acknowledges people’s birth, but not their conception), or between human and animal (it’s pretty clear than humans cannot cross-breed with apes, unlike buffalo and cattle or horses and donkeys).

    The Oregon assisted-suicide law would screen out people like Ms. Johnson, as well as other people with progressive neurological disorders like MS or ALS - it’s impossible to predict the progress of these diseases as opposed to, say, cancer.

    The Oregon assisted-suicide law merely allows people who are too incapacitated to commit suicide normally to have someone assist them - and a number of people die during the waiting period.

    This comment was written by Aaron.
    Report this comment to the moderators
  2. patricia olds Writes:
    November 15th, 2004 at 5:37 am

    I have ms and live in a wheelchair. Harriet M. Johnson is my heroine. I am working on accessibility and sensitivity in the village of Yellow Springs, OH. I would like to get in touch with Ms Johnson to invite her to come here to speak. Can you give me her phone number?

    This comment was written by patricia olds.
    Report this comment to the moderators

Leave a Reply

If you have questions about the moderation policies here, please read this post. Short version: treat other posters with respect.

(Need to know how to create blockquotes and links, i.e., linked text?)

If your submitted comment fails to appear, without even an error or "waiting for moderation" message, then our spam-blocking program may have blocked your comment by mistake. When this happens, please contact the moderators right away so we can rescue your comment!