I just published the following on the League to Fight Neurelitism site:

For Immediate Release

In commemoration of the seminal United Nations document, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The League to Fight Neurelitism, in a spirit of like-mindedness with many others throughout the world, recognizes each month of December as Human Rights Month. Within that month, the League observes the tenth, the anniversary of the Declaration, as United Nations Human Rights Day and the twentieth, through a focus on combatting global poverty, as United Nations International Human Solidarity Day.

At a time when many persons are searching for an enlightened secular alternative to holidays such as Christmas and Channukah, while others remain discouraged by the pervasive and crass materialism of that time of year, Human Rights Month, Human Rights Day, and International Human Solidarity Day remind us of important socially designated human rights, while giving us the opportunity to shift the centers of our thought and attention to those individuals, including autistics, whose civil and other human rights are violated regularly and systematically.

Respectfully submitted,

Mark A. Foster, Ph.D.
Founding Director,
The League to Fight Neurelitism

URL: http://humanrights.neurelitism.com

I have moved my blog to this site.

Sociologist Karl Mannheim distinguished between ideology and utopia (which is roughly equivalent to the distinction Marx made between false consciousness and class consciousness). The ideology, in this framework, is the "establishment" belief system (dating myself here) supported by social and cultural elites. The utopia is the shared belief system of the oppressed or, to use Franz Fanon's famous term, les damnés de la terre (the wretched of the earth).

Personally, I see neurodiversity, in Mannheim's context, as a utopia worth striving for.

The Johnson County Community College autism conference ended on Friday. Among the speakers were Stephen Shore (who delivered the plenary address), Ari Ne'eman (president of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network), and Scott Robertson (the vice-president). All three of these speakers did an excellent job.

I was among those persons on the autism spectrum featured on a video. After the showing, a few of us who were present at the conference formed a panel. I was the moderator. The questions were all interesting and respectful.

Placing many of the parents of autistic children (the so-called "curebees") with neurodiversity self-advocates is always potentially explosive. Fortunately, there were no problems until the very end.

As the conference was concluding, a couple of parents challenged the self-advocacy position. It was a bit like a situation where, hypothetically, the parents of adoptive children of color would assert their right to speak for persons of color, even to disagree with some or most adults of color, purely by virtue of parenting.