Questions I have wanted answers to!

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1. Will somebody please explain to me in rational terms why Autism Speaks is supposed to be evil?

2. Which is the minority in this population: having grown up in a dysfunctional home or not?

3. Preferring a single and consistently trustworthy source of information for any topic out there instead of having to use a "hit and miss" approach?

Thank you for reading.

I can't answer your first question
I must admit I'm a little distracted by the noisome interloper.
I think that my family is.. well .. neurologically diverse, at least. My mother is bipolar. It's a somewhat functional arrangement. I think my parents put up a decent front. We function. Some of us more angrily than others. ::ahem::

As far as #1, AS promulgates highly negative ways of describing autism, such as, "autism is worse than pediatric AIDS," "autism is worse than cancer," "autism will destroy your marriage," and so on. Their "ransom notes" campaign, and the piece they did involving a mother who mentioned thoughts of killing her autistic child ("Autism Every Day," IIRC) are also infamous for similar reasons.

Also, they support/provide funding for research into cures.

There's probably more, but AFAIK those are the big complaints. Another is that there are no autistics on their board, so how do they get off calling themselves "Autism Speaks." Though John Elder Robison is now on one of their boards, but I can't remember the details. AFAIK, though, he is the only one.

#2 I have no idea.

#3 That would nice, but then if there was one, I would never trust it.

Autism Speaks is the opposite of an advocate for people with autism. Autism Speaks does not want to help us, they want to eliminate us from the world, The leaders of Autism Speaks have made themselves millions of dollars by using shock tactics in its advertisements seeking donations. Their advertisements make it seem like autistic people live their entire lives in a constant state of one meltdown after another. The goal of Autism speaks is to cure autism by identifying the genomes responsible for it. That leads many of us to believe they are going to test fetuses for autism like they do for down syndrome and other birth defects. Currently these screening tests are done early enough for a fetus with undesirable characteristics be aborted. In addition to wanting to abort one out of every one hundred people, they do not fund or encourage any programs that help existing autistic people to get treatment or support. Autism Speaks does the opposite of Speaking for those of us who are Autistic.

My family was not dysfunctional, but it is a good question.

As long a man can profit or gain power from disinformation, there will never be a single and consistently trustworthy source of information. Trusted sources are prime targets for agenda driven people to try to control.