More Bogus Autism Promises from Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton is up to her old tricks, shamelessly making conflicting promises to all of the cure groups, while ignoring the views of autistic people entirely. While campaigning in Iowa on Saturday, she characterized autism as an environmentally caused health crisis:


"I believe there are environmental triggers," she said.

Clinton said people are exposed to thousands of chemicals. "They are in the carpets. They are in the paints. They are in the clothes we wear," she said.


If you've been wondering what sort of political experience the second-term junior Senator from New York has been touting when she goes around claiming to have 35 years of experience, well, I'll have to admit that her skills at equivocation and triangulation are right up there with the best of Washington's career liars. It's not easy to pander to the biomed crowd and the behaviorists at the same time, while also sucking up to Autism Speaks and advocating eugenic "prevention," but she manages it:


Clinton’s plan would include a task force, that would include people from the autism community, that would be charged with identifying gaps in evidence-based biomedical research, behavioral treatments, and services for children and adults with autism.


It's all too obvious that her idea of "people from the autism community" does not include any actual autistic people. Looks like she still hasn't noticed that there are over one million autistic Americans who are of voting age. Or perhaps she thinks that we have so little money and influence that we can be ignored, marginalized, and eugenically exterminated without any political cost to her.

To contrast Hillary's smarmy pandering with the principled views of Barack Obama, who cares deeply about the civil rights of minority groups, take a look at these comments posted by Kassiane on the Autism Vox blog:


...Obama listened in the summer of 2004 when a pigtailed dripping wet kid who’d been in an outdoor fountain (designed for the purpose) nearly tackled him at an Event to talk about autism, just before voting in her first big election...

Before then he said he hadn’t heard anything about autistic adults except the inaccurate bits in college & in the awareness campaigns. And in 2004 Obama said he would respect all diversity, that the idea that differences in brain wiring are valid ways of being made sense…


Respecting diversity may not get as much media attention as making phony promises to combat a staged epidemic of mass hysteria, but it certainly shows which candidate would best represent America's autistic citizens.