Kind of a weak article in the Times this morning on a fascinating topic --- voting rights for people with severe cognitive disabilities.

The article opens by describing a current dispute in Rhode Island that demonstrates the potential popular appeal of measures to deny the vote to people with certain cognitive impairments. It involves two murderers, each of whom received a "not guilty by reason of insanity" verdict at trial, and each of whom is currently institutionalized. Both would be barred from voting under Rhode Island law if they had been convicted of the murders they committed, and I'll concede that it does seem a little counterintuitive that the fact of their mental illness should be the circumstance that protects their vote. (The voting rights of felons themselves is a topic for another post.)

But advocates for the men make a compelling case that the act of voting is a valuable part of their treatment and a step in the process of reintegrating them into the world. And a local election official's take on the case shows how broadly an adverse precedent could be applied, saying that "if you are declared insane you should not be allowed to vote, period." He continues, "Is insanity a disability? I have an answer to that: no. You’re insane; you’re nuts."

The Times article makes prominent reference to the "risks" of voting by people with cognitive disabilities, but the only examples of such risks it offers are cases in which it was charged that absentee ballots were filed fraudulently on behalf of nursing home residents. And such abuse does not require an "incompetent" voter, as the article contends --- just a nursing home staffer willing to defraud the elderly by submitting illegitimate absentee ballots in their names.

Near the end of the piece, a Columbia psychiatry professor named Paul Appelbaum is quoted saying that "to fail to have any standard that requires a person to have a grasp of what the process is all about would degrade the voting process." This makes me bridle for three reasons.

First, his use of the conditional mood ("would degrade") suggests that we currently do have such a standard, and that there's a danger in eliminating it. Given that Appelbaum is an advocate of subjecting Alzheimer's patients who wish to continue voting to testing not currently mandated by law, this is a tendentious misrepresentation of the current state of voting rights.

Second, the idea of a "standard that requires a person to have a grasp of what the process is all about" brings to my mind the infamous voter literacy tests of the Jim Crow era. Such tests were never applied uniformly or fairly, and their very existence was --- like the tests that Appelbaum wishes to impose on Alzheimer's patients --- a violation of the principle that all citizens are presumptively entitled to vote.

Finally, Appelbaum's role in this process itself concerns me. Health care professionals should not be forced to serve as gatekeepers for the franchise, and Appelbaum's eagerness to perform that function does not mitigate the impropriety of imposing it on other doctors.

New Jersey's state constitution presently includes a 1789 clause declaring that "No idiot or insane person shall enjoy the right of suffrage." A proposal before the state legislature would bring the wording of the constitution into accordance with state case law by replacing the phrase "idiot or insane person" with "person who has been adjudicated by a court of competent jurisdiction to lack the capacity to understand the act of voting."

This approach is, it seems to me, the right one. It is narrowly tailored to the specific competency requirements involved in the exercise of the franchise, it considers the question of voter competency on a case-by-case basis, and it places the question of eligibility in the hands of the courts, rather than those of doctors or local election officials.

Tags: aging, disability, essays, history, politics

My job as a parent isn’t to make sure that my child’s next tantrum ends after ten seconds rather than ninety. It’s not to keep my kid in her seat for the entirety of a five-hour plane ride. It’s not to keep her from making a mess with the sugar packets at the restaurant. If I can manage all that, fabulous. But it’s not my highest priority.

My job as a parent is to do what I can to shape my kid into a decent adult. If that process requires, in my estimation, a three-minute tantrum at the art museum or seventeen laps up and down the airplane aisle or a mound of Splenda next to the dessert fork, that’s a price we’re all going to have to pay. I’ll be mortified while it’s happening, and I’ll apologize if I can — and if we do the Splenda thing I promise that I’ll tip you forty percent and try to clean up before leaving — but I’m in this for the long haul, and I’ve gotta do what I’ve gotta do.

In a few decades you’re going to be on line at the supermarket, and you’re going to have left your glasses at home. You won’t be able to remember exactly what your doctor said about sodium and the cashier will be no help and you’ll be holding up the line and somebody will be glaring and somebody else will be muttering and you’ll just be trying to buy yourself some goddamn tomato soup.

If all goes according to plan, my daughter will be the woman on line behind you who reads you your coupons and the soup can, and goes and changes the high-salt soup you wound up with for a can of the low-sodium Campbell’s, and stands between you and the folks who are glaring at you for taking so long while you’re counting out your dimes and nickels so they don’t rattle you and make you lose your count.

If you’re on a JFK-Seattle flight in a couple of weeks and there’s a four-year-old sitting behind you, that’s my kid. If she kicks your seat, and I hope she doesn’t, try to keep in mind that she’s on her way to visit her great-grandmother in the nursing home, and that the seat-kicking is a part of the process of turning a squalling baby into the nice woman who helps you figure out your coupons. That’s what I’m working toward. That’s the person I’m trying to build.

(Originally posted in this thread.)

Tags: aging, parenting

It turns out that the great New Yorker article I just read about aging, and about the medical specialty of geriatrics --- what it is, how it operates, why it's so important, why it's disappearing from American medical practice, and what can be done about it --- is up online. Go read it.

Seriously. If you're old, if you're getting old, if you know anyone who's old, or if you or anyone you know may possibly get old in the future, go read it.

Tags: aging

When I wrote this post about public space, children, and people with disabilities, I picked the Museum of Modern Art as an example mostly at random --- and secondarily, I guess, because it's a challenging space to navigate with a child.

So I was pleased to discover, when C2 and I visited a couple of weeks ago, that they have really extensive programs for both children and people with disabilities.

They have separate programs for four-year-olds, five-to-ten-year-olds, and eleven-to-fourteen-year-olds. You read that right --- they have a program of activities specifically for four-year-olds.

And in addition to programming and accessibility provisions for people with visual and auditory disabilities, they have telephone-based art courses for people who can't leave their homes and monthly in-museum events for people with Alzheimer's.

So wow.

Tags: aging, disability, parenting

Okay, here's the thing. Here's the thing that those of us who are no longer kids, not yet old, and not presently dealing with disabilities need to understand:

Public space is not our space. Children, the elderly, and people with disabilities don't use parks, restaurants, stores, museums, and theaters at our indulgence, because it's not our space. It's everyone's space, and everyone has an equal claim on it.

Parents who take their kids to adult-oriented places --- myself very much included --- tend to overstate the case for our children. "My kid would never scream in a museum or throw food in a restaurant," we say. " My kid would never impose on other people, and if she did, I'd deal with it. When you're complaining about kids, you're complaining about other people's kids. Don't lump my kid in with them."

But here's my secret: My kid doesn't actually behave as well as I do in museums. Sometimes she whines. Sometimes she has to be reminded to to keep her voice down, or not to run. So yeah, when I take her to the Museum of Modern Art, we do impose on other patrons, at least a little.

And you know what? A little imposition on other patrons is okay. I'll apologize sincerely to anyone she disturbs, but I'm not going to apologize for her presence. Because MoMA is C2's space as much as it is mine.

My sister whines in public sometimes, too. Sometimes she gets overwhelmed and cries. Sometimes she raises her voice. (Running in museums is not an issue with her, I'm happy to say.) If we say that C2 shouldn't go to museums because she might whine or cry or raise her voice, then we have to say that my sister can't go either --- and one of the best days I ever spent with my sister was the day that we visited a MoMA exhibit of design for people with disabilities. MoMA is my sister's space as much as it is mine.

And if we say that people who might whine or cry or raise their voices shouldn't go to museums, then we're going to have to bar my grandmother, too --- if not now then very soon. My grandmother the artist. My grandmother who, when she was in college in Idaho six decades ago, read Dorothy Parker and hung a print of the Rouen cathedral on her wall. My grandmother, whose copies of the catalogues of the MoMA "High and Low" exhibit and the Peggy Guggenheim collection sit on my bookshelf.

MoMA is my grandmother's space far more than it is mine. She almost certainly will never again see the inside of it, but if she does, the rest of the people there will just have to suck it up. She's old, and being old isn't always pretty.

I was talking about all this on the phone with C1 a little while ago, talking about the fact that this way of looking at things is a lot less clean, a lot less comfortable than the "you're complaining about other people's kids, not mine" way. Talking about the question of disruptiveness, and how much is too much. And she reminded me what she tells C2 about riding her Big Wheel on the sidewalk --- that it's not enough to not bump into people, that you have to respect them. You can't ride so fast or so close that you scare them, or make them step out of your way. If you see that they're nervous, you have to slow down even more, and give them even more room. You have to minimize the disruption as much as you can.

Because C2 isn't a lone child zooming through a world of uniformly robust adults. When she's out on the street, she's riding next to other kids who might not be paying attention, and next to old people who might be really worried about falling and shattering a hip, and next to folks carrying heavy and fragile packages, and so on and on. The duty to minimize disruption isn't a duty that the young and the old and those with disabilities have to the robust adults among us, it's a reciprocal duty that each of us, whatever our condition, has to each of our neighbors, whatever their condition.

Each of us has an obligation to refrain from whining too long or too loudly in museums. But each of us also has an obligation to accept the company of others good-naturedly, and to respond with grace when disruptions inevitably occur.


Update: Oh, and one other thing. Children, the elderly, and people with disabilities aren't the only people who occasionally cause disruption in public spaces through no fault of their own. Anyone can be seized by a coughing fit at the ballet.

Tags: aging, disability, essays, parenting, politics