When Curebies Cry

I have had Prince's song "When Doves Cry" stuck in my head for about the past two weeks. Although I generally like Prince's music, it is starting to get seriously annoying. So I decided to turn the song into a commentary on something that is a lot more annoying—curebies and their nasty schemes to take advantage of unsuspecting families.


WHEN CUREBIES CRY

Imagine a sick, twisted world
Where many children are treated like s---
Spoken of as soulless animals
In your worst nightmares
Can you picture it?

Schemers are open for business
An ocean of quackery in bloom
Crackpots peddle curious potions
They smell the cash
The profits from selling doom

How come they can't get their story straight
When they say autistic kids are half dead?
Maybe it's pollution they say to hate
Maybe it's those evil vaccines instead
Maybe it's Refrigerator Mother
There's always another lie
Who cares if they contradict each other
This is what it sounds like
When curebies cry

Take out a second mortgage
Buying the miracle cure
You've got to do whatever they say
Or your kid's hopeless
A burden to endure

How can they have so little decency?
They're roaming the world in packs
Maybe if they're clever, you won't see
That they are just a bunch of liars and quacks
It doesn't take many crocodile tears
To look like a caring guy
They want to prey on your worst fears
Hang on to your wallet
When curebies cry...

Autism Causation Mad Libs

After reading Bev's Aspie blog post generator, I was inspired to create the following Mad Libs story for your enjoyment. When I was a kid, I was a big fan of Mad Libs, which (for those who haven't seen them) are stories that contain blank spaces. One person reads the story to another; the listener, who hasn't seen the story, provides words at random to fill in the blanks when asked for verbs, nouns, etc. The results are often quite funny.

If you're in the mood for some merriment, feel free to print out this post and share it with a friend!


AUTISM CAUSATION


Autism is a ___________ (adjective) ___________ (noun) that involves ___________ (adjective) behavior. It may be caused by ___________ (noun), or perhaps by a combination of ___________ (adjective) ___________ (noun), ___________ (plural noun), and ___________ (adjective) ___________ (noun).

Because people in positions of authority have described autism as ___________ (adjective), some parents have become convinced that they need to ___________ (verb) their autistic children ___________ (adverb) by means of ___________ (noun). They may take their children to visit ___________ (plural noun) for therapies such as ___________ (adjective) ___________ (noun) or buy dietary supplements consisting of ___________ (plural noun) and perhaps also some ___________ (adjective) ___________ (plural noun).

This has been claimed to result in autistic children becoming ___________ (plural noun) who are indistinguishable from ___________ (adjective) ___________ (plural noun).


Grab a pencil and have fun! And remember, no matter how silly the answers end up being, they're probably going to make more sense than most of the autism causation and treatment claims out there.

The envelope, please...

I'm back from a relaxing vacation—many thanks to all the well-wishers who commented on my last post! I have to admit that, when I wasn't lazing around in the sun, I spent too much time letting my mind vegetate in the absurdities of the pop-culture entertainment industry. That's not too bad though, because Hollywood and its fat cats, especially those of the curebie variety, make great fodder for blog posts. Their antics are deserving of a very special awards ceremony for memorable moments in autism epidemic hype and related melodrama. So, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I give you—the Yappy Awards!

Best Dramatic Exit goes to David Kirby, who, after insulting autistic people in just about every way imaginable, now proclaims that he is tired of autism. Guess what, Kirby, autistic people got tired of you and your bigotry a long time ago. Your 15 minutes of fame are so totally over, dude. Don't let the stage door hit you in the butt.

Best Soap Opera can only belong to Bob and Suzanne Wright for their public feuding with their daughter Katie and their alleged failure to pay film producer Lauren Thierry. As noted by Kev, this category also includes a Best Villain Award to JB Handley for stirring the pot (which looks suspiciously like a witches' cauldron) at every opportunity.

Best Comedy is awarded to the Antivax Follies, now appearing live on stage at Nonsense Central and featuring a slapstick performance of Expert Witness Limbo—how low can they go? It's more fun than a barrel of rhesus monkeys.

The Mystery category belongs to Steven Spielberg for his inexplicable endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president. Spielberg has an Asperger diagnosis. Sen. Clinton is a strong supporter of Autism Speaks and its goal of a world with no autistic people. Given the fact that Spielberg made a movie about the Holocaust, we know he's not ignorant of the historical consequences of such rhetoric. The only conclusion I can draw is that Spielberg is so completely out of touch with the real world that he's not even aware of Autism Speaks' genocidal agenda.

Best Prime-Time (Melo)Drama goes to Desperate Curebies, starring Jon Shestack of Cure Autism Now, who gave up his pretense of being unaware of our blogs and posted a sympathy-seeking comment on Autism Vox. Now he's bleating that he just wants to help his son, who "knows he is autistic and he has told us many times that he doesn’t like it." I'm not the least bit impressed by your crocodile tears about your son's feelings, Jon, after you spent so many years insisting that he had no feelings and wasn't even sentient. It's time for you to depart the stage with the 21st century equivalent of the traditional vaudeville sendoff for melodramatic hacks—a barrage of virtual rotten tomatoes.

The show isn't nearly over yet, folks, so don't change the channel! Just get your favorite beverage and some tasty hot buttered popcorn, and sit back and enjoy the spectacle as the curebies self-destruct.

Another Curebie Bites the Dust

Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a.k.a. Perp-in-Chief of the Combating Autism Act, got his ass kicked in yesterday's elections and will not be returning to Capitol Hill. Woo-hoo!

I hope y'all don't mind if I do a bit of gleeful dancing on his grave:



The only thing I hate worse than a slimy politician who advocates eugenics is a lying, sanctimonious, slimy politician who bleats about family values and respect for human life while advocating eugenics.

We still have a long way to go in making the world a decent place, but at least we're rid of one of them now.

I think I'll go crack open a beer and drink a toast to Santorum's political demise.

Social Interaction and Cure

I wrote a post in September about defining curebie-ism, in which I said that a parent's attitude toward his or her child determines whether that parent is a curebie, rather than the choice of any particular treatment or therapy. At the conclusion of the post, I wrote, "If you care whether your autistic child thinks you are a curebie—you're not one."

Wade Rankin responded by pointing out that all parents have to make choices that will change their children's development in one way or another, regardless of whether the children approve. At first glance, that seems like a sensible enough point, and one that is true whether or not a child is autistic. When you stop a toddler from wandering away, for instance, you don't worry about whether you're stifling her adventurous spirit. Parents are constantly shaping their children's personalities by making everyday decisions; it would be impossible to do otherwise.

I gave the question some more thought after reading Tera's recent post about the attitude shown by Alison Tepper Singer (of Autism Every Day infamy) toward her daughter and the idea of cure. Singer opined that her daughter had no abilities and that there was no reason to be concerned about squashing the child's natural personality. That's curebie-ism at its worst: a total lack of acknowledgment that an autistic child even has any feelings and thoughts that are worthy of concern.

Most parents who talk about "curing" their children are not in that category. They're not trying to change their kid into a completely different person, they say; rather, they just want the kid to have more ability to communicate and interact with society. While that's a reasonable goal in itself, sometimes it seems as if these parents overlook the fact that their autistic children already are interacting with society. Wade's post, for example, describes how he imagines his son, if "cured," might behave:

Why, my son asks rhetorically, did I ever think it necessary to “cure” him; did I consider him “defective?” Without waiting for a response, my son storms out of the house and walks outside to his waiting friends, to whom he complains about how I just don’t understand him the way his friends do. If my son would only look to the front window of the house, he would see me peeking out from behind the curtain, listening to him interacting with his friends. And he would see me grinning from ear to ear.

Wade, I have to ask: do you really believe that autistic teenagers have to be "cured" before they are capable of interacting with friends and complaining about their parents? Because if that's what you believe, I take it you haven't looked at the Aspies for Freedom (AFF) forum recently, or any of the other websites where thousands of autistic teens are venting—quite vociferously indeed—about how society and their parents have treated them. And they're not "cured" by any stretch of the imagination.

Before I go any farther on this topic, I want to make it clear that I do not share the attitudes I'm about to discuss. My parents always respected my individuality and treated me as a worthwhile human being; I have no grudges against them whatsoever. I also don't intend this post to be a personal rant against Wade or any other parent who has expressed a desire to "cure" a child, but I feel that it's necessary to bring certain unfortunate facts to their attention.

In the decade since the Asperger diagnosis came into common use, large numbers of autistic youths—mostly male—have grown up feeling profoundly alienated from society. Many of them spent their childhood sitting in segregated classrooms, swallowing daily doses of behavior control meds, going from one therapy to another, and hearing themselves described as tragically defective sufferers whose existence should have been prevented by means of prenatal testing. They are full of rage and despair at a society that they believe has not only rejected them utterly, but has also turned their parents against them. This is not the typical teenage angst that many of us remember, nor is it an irrational creation of disordered minds. It is a corrosive, soul-crushing despair that has grown out of actual experiences.

The following poem by "kai," recently posted on the AFF site, illustrates the raw depth of such feelings:

ME

it's hard for me to sleep...i fear my dreams
it's hard for me to live..i fear my life
i fear feeling too much
or at all
even the happy feelings bind with strife
and all the joy is tainted with a sting
and all the light is faded with a gray
all the drugs are based in an addiction
and hopes that they could take the pain away
and if somebody feels we call it crazy
and if i feel i tell myself to stop
if i dream i wake up kind of shaky
and if i live i tell myself to not
then i run somewhere i haven't been yet
and promise things will turn out right this time
take another pill to make it better
and find myself inside this paradigm
everywhere i go i build with dreams
and the dreams are everything i couldn't be
those dreams become a prison that i hide in
and that prison that i hide in
becomes me

Amy and Gareth Nelson, the administrators of AFF, have repeatedly stated that they do not advocate, and will not condone, any violent or illegal acts. But sometimes their efforts remind me of the story of the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, trying to hold back a flood. They had to talk one guy out of a suicide terrorist attack on the Judge Rotenberg Center. Someone else posted that he was thinking about immolating himself to protest society's abuse of autistics, like the Buddhist monks who committed suicide during the Vietnam War. And this was posted just yesterday, in reference to what could be done to stop eugenic abortion:

A bit of C4, some matches for the data, and some .50 cal bullets for the researchers will do the trick.

Frankly, I'm surprised that there hasn't been any terrorism committed by autistics. If any other minority group were this close to genocide, there's no doubt a "liberation army" would consider itself morally justified in fighting back by any means. Although autistics are often considered to be more analytical and less emotional than the general population, we do have a broad range of personality types, and not all of us have a natural inclination toward calmly seeking peaceful solutions.

I don't advocate or condone violence either, and I really hope it doesn't happen. (Edited for more emphasis: If anyone reading this post has been thinking about committing a terrorist act, DON'T DO IT.) But we need to face the fact that we now have a social minority underclass of angry youths with little or no hope for the future, who grew up being treated as damaged goods and who are likely to remain unemployed because of discrimination; and historically, that always has been a recipe for disaster.

Wade—I don't know anything about your family situation, and I am not claiming that this is how your son feels. I wouldn't presume to suggest that, and for both his sake and yours, I hope it isn't so. However, under the circumstances, it's likely that when he starts complaining about his life to his friends, you will not find that to be an occasion for "grinning from ear to ear."

I recommend reading the short story "Poor Little Black Fellow," written by Langston Hughes and published in 1934 as part of the collection The Ways of White Folks. It's about a young African-American man who travels to Paris with the well-meaning white couple who raised him. For the first time in his life, he finds himself in an environment where he is seen as a human being like everyone else, rather than as a "Negro." When he decides to stay in Paris, his foster parents are dismayed, believing him to be ungrateful for failing to appreciate their efforts to help him deal with his disadvantages and make the best of his status in American society.

Defining Curebie-ism

While I was reading blogs yesterday, I came across a post by a worried father who believed that autistic activists were opposed to any attempt to improve an autistic child's health. The father wrote that he was not trying to cure his daughter's autism, but he was afraid that when she grew older, she might hate him for giving her vitamins and a healthy diet.

I posted a comment that referred him to Kevin Leitch's recent post Biomed Is A Spectrum and explained that neurodiversity advocates do not object to reasonable diets and vitamins, but rather to harmful products and quack therapies.

Then I started to wonder if his misconception about autistic activists came from reading rants against "curebies," which usually have no definition of the word. I decided that it would be useful to clarify just what goes into the curebie mindset and why conscientious parents who care about their children's health and well-being are not curebies.

The defining characteristic of a curebie is a fanatical desperation to destroy a child's autistic traits in their entirety. Autism takes on a separate and distinct identity in the curebie mind; it is personified as a demonic foe that must be defeated at all costs. The child ceases to be seen as a sentient person and instead is treated as if he were a battleground for a cosmic struggle between good and evil. Jonathan Shestack, co-founder and president of Cure Autism Now, exemplified this mindset when he wrote that autism parents do not have a child but "a shell, a ghost of all the dreams and hopes you ever had."

Curebie-ism can be described as a cultlike ideology of exorcising the "demon" of neurological difference. It is not about any particular diet or therapy, although many curebies become obsessed with one snake-oil product or another. Their fanatical quest often leads them to endanger their child's health with bogus treatments. Some curebies idolize quacks like Mark Geier and David Geier, who are infamous for using chemical castration drugs on autistic children and committing blatant insurance fraud, as well as other conscienceless hucksters who peddle poison.

To pay for whatever they see as a potential cure, many curebies go deeply into debt and then blame their child for ruining their life. There are some curebies who fantasize about killing their autistic child, have no qualms about saying so while the child is listening, and seek to justify their murderous views by asserting that all parents of autistic children "share that hidden, dark thought," as two board members of Autism Speaks, Harry and Laura Slatkin, recently claimed. Curebies like this are so full of hate toward their own children that many of them support genetic research to exterminate the entire global autistic population through prenatal screening and eugenic abortion.

Some curebies troll the neurodiversity blogs and post bigoted comments that insult autistics. I'm not going to bother to provide an example of such comments, as I expect they'll show up soon enough and make it very plain what I'm talking about.

Here's a quick test for any parent who may still be unsure of what curebie-ism is. If you care whether your autistic child thinks you are a curebie—you're not one.

Cure This

I noticed a couple of months ago that both Autism Diva and Kassiane posted photos of themselves as children, in response to curebies who did not believe they really were autistic. This goes to show just how extreme the prejudice has gotten: some curebies react with incredulity when they see a website built by an autistic person, despite the fact that there are millions of autistics worldwide who read, write, and use computers every day. (And hey, autistics invented the Internet, too.)

The closest historical parallel to the "you can't possibly be autistic" attitude can be found in the slaveowners of the American South, who passed laws making it illegal to teach slaves to read and write. Then they arrogantly insisted that essays written by black abolitionists had to be fraudulent because "everyone knew" that blacks were mentally incapable of reading and writing.

After reflection, I've decided to post my own pictorial commentary on bigoted attitudes like that. You can find it in the sidebar. And as you've probably guessed if you're a regular reader of my blog, it's not a collection of cute little baby pictures. Enjoy.

Getting Religion

Enter the Most Exalted Reverend, stage left.

MOST EXALTED REVEREND: Hallelujah, amen, welcome all ye righteous brethren and sisters to the Curebie Church of Everlasting Conformity. If ye have faith as a mustard seed, ye shall say to an autistic child, "Be thou cured," and that child shall sprout wool and hooves, yea, verily, and shall become a perfect bleating sheep, indistinguishable from the flock. (Mustard seeds available at very reasonable discount prices from our friendly neighborhood DAN! practitioner after the service. Praise the Lord!)

CHILD: That's not a sheep! It's a boy with wool glued all over him.

MOTHER: Shh! Shh!

Enter Deacon JBjr, holding the collection plate.

DEACON JBjr: ALA is God! There is no God but ALA! Bow humbly before the sacred altar on which standeth the holy bottles of common dietary supplements! Empty thine pockets into the collection plate! Amen!

CHILD: The Most Exalted Reverend has no clothes.

MOTHER: Say "baa," or I'll have to chelate you again.

Enter a Snake Handler, carrying a cage full of rattlesnakes.

SNAKE HANDLER: Yea, though we walk in the valley of the shadow of death, chelation will not harm us, if only we have faith! Pick up a rattlesnake and be saved by the power of God!

DEACON JBjr: You mean ALA.

SNAKE HANDLER: Whatever.

CHILD: What is the Most Exalted Reverend doing with that worshipper who dropped his pants and bent over?

MOTHER: That's enough, young man! I'm giving you a shot of Lupron when we get home!

Enter the High Inquisitor, garbed as an Opus Dei penitent, holding a bloodstained whip.

HIGH INQUISITOR: The earth is flat! Evolution is an atheist plot! Autism is caused by alien transporter devices beaming mercury into our brains, hence we must wear our tinfoil beanies at all times! Any heretic who speaketh the evil words "scientific proof" shall be burned at the stake forthwith!

CHILD: Ulp!

MOTHER: (Pats child on head) You mean "baa," dear.

MOST EXALTED REVEREND: Let us all turn to page 666 in our hymnals and bleat together in brotherly love.

CONGREGATION: Baa! Baa! Baa!