I'm kind of offended by The Autistic Pride movements

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Moreso, their efforts to link it to the gay rights movement. You're "cause" is NOTHING like that of the lgbt movement, so please don't leech off it.

Do they get denied benefits from government?
No

Has anyone ever been killed for being autistic?
Not that I can think of.

Is being against Autism a major political issue?
No

Yeah, that's what I thought. Sure they may get teased, but society can be downright ugly to the gay community and to think you're social troubles are in anyway applicable, then please keep your delusions.

I for the most part agree - the LGBT fight is a far more serious matter. I don't know how the AS movement is trying to connect, but we can probably learn something from LGBT rights, and what I do like is the idea that we can stand in solidarity. But yes, our issues, relatively speaking, are small potatoes, and trying to elevate them to the same level is a laughable.

Plenty of autistic people have lost basic human rights.



http://www.geocities.com/growingjoel/murder.html



And those are the ones that are known about. When "psycho in an institution" dies, it doesn't usually get noticed or cared about. If a parent kills their autistic kid, it's apparently "understandable," as few are prosecuted for it.

Here's one with the article attached. Google provides plenty of similar examples:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,322352,00.html




No, but neither is rights for autistics. Even just ten years ago aversives were not unusual. (And that's not to say they aren't still happening in places today.)

Behavior modification is the most popular treatment for both autism and homosexuality. Dr. Rekers and Dr. Lovaas worked together on the "UCLA feminine boy project." Dr. Lovaas moved on to autistics, who could complain less and were less sympathetic to the public, to continue his brand of behavior mod.



If you're going with the stereotypical "nerd who works in Silicon Valley" image, I suppose it could seem that way. But some end up disowned, on the street, or institutionalized, much as some gay kids do. You're probably less likely to see those autistics on the internet, obviously. And there are those with problems with activities of daily living, sensory issues that make leaving the house flat-out dangerous, executive functioning bad enough to need assistance for survival -- it's isn't all just social problems.

Here's what 2 autistics have been through:
http://www.autistics.org/library/conversation.html

And another:
http://www.autistics.org/library/anon-bio.html

This is from another thread. It's a list of people killed because they were autistic.
Becoming a trend?

Casey Albury (Age 17, died 1997)
Angelica Auriemma (Age 20, died 5 Dec. 2003)
Dale Bartolome (Age 27, died 29 July 2002)
Charles-Antoine Blais (Age 6, died Nov. 1996)
Eric Bland (Age 38, 2004)
Jeffrey Bogrett (Age 9, died 1 Dec. 1995)
Gabriel Britt (Age 6, died 3 March 2001)
Casey Collier (Age 17, died 21 Dec. 1993)
Maggie Caraballo (Age 38, died 20 Aug. 2003)
Jonathan Carey (Age 13, died February 2007)
Terrance Cottrell, Jr. (Age 8, died 22 Aug. 2003)
James Joseph Cummings, Jr. (Age 46, died 16 Nov. 1999)
Jason Dawes (Age 10, died Aug. 2003)
Christopher DeGroot (Age 19, died 19 May 2006)
Brahim Dukes (Age 18, died 29 Dec. 2001)
Marcus Fiesel (Age 3, died August 2006)
Lillian Leilani Gill (Age 4, died March 2002)
Matthew Goodman (Age 14, died 6 Feb. 2002)
Jim Helm (died 1998)
Stephanie Jobin (Age 13, died 17 June 1998)
Daniel Leubner (Age 13, died 4 Sept. 1999)
Katherine McCarron (Age 3, died 13 may 2006)
Patrick Markcrow (Age 36, died 29 March 2005)
Justin Malphus (Age 5, died 19 April 2000)
Charles Mancill (Age 24, died 13 Feb. 2002)
Sean Miles (Age 37, died 2 May 2006)
Abubakar Nadama (Age 5, died 23 Aug. 2005)
Mark Owens-Young-Rogan (Age 11, died 17 Sept. 2001)
Pierre Pasquiou (Age 10, died 28 Dec. 1998)
Tiffany Pinckney (Age 23, died 2 April 2005)
Michael Renner-Lewis (Age 15, died 25 Aug. 2003)
Nozomu Shinozaki (Age 22, died 25 Feb. 2003)
Craig Sorger (Age 12, died 15 Feb. 2003)
Ulysses Stable (Age 12, died 22 Nov. 2006)
Tanaka (Age 14, died 24 July 2002)
Matthew Vick (Age 23, died 25 May 2002)
Wayne Winter (Age 39, died 15 Jan. 2001)
Willie Wright (Age 15, died 4 March 2000)

From thiswayoflife.org.

So it happens. I'm not sure it's useful to start a who suffers worse contest. So let's not.

And that list was only made in recent years. Until about half a century ago it was not normal to care for special need children. It was normal for such children to die in tragic "accidents".

Autistic people are treated completely unfairly by many people who expect autistic people to be as sociable as anything. as a society, people are relying more and more on 'social structure', which is exactly something autistic people cannot be a part of.

Many people have been killed for being autistic, Terrance Cottrell is one that springs to mind.

Autism is a major political issue, as with any mental condition.

Being gay is more accepted in society then being Autistic, By definition. I dont think youve ever been denied to go to a summer school, or for a job application, because the employer is worried that you wont be able to do the job, SIMPLY on the basis of the way you were born, And im not saying that homosexual people arent discriminated against because they are.

People with mental conditions like autism have to go through life with NT's calling them names like 'ret*d'.

(We Link more to the Deaf Community if anything by the way)

I may not have been killed but I have been spit on, thrown down a flight of stairs,beaten up by a small crowd at one time, and singled out for beatings compared to the other special education students who did not have Aspergers.

Being autistic is no more a choice than being gay. Both groups tend to be ostracized by the majority. Lots of people have been killed, many of them children. Some have been shot by police who erroneously thought their "erratic" behavior was indicative of drug use and then fired on them when their hands went near their pockets (assumed to be reaching for a gun). People with Autism are often targeted by bullies, both obvious bullies and 'stealth' bullies who use them while pretending to be friends. Yes, in many states, disability payments are denied if the intelligence scores are above the MR range. Of course, many individuals with Autism who might otherwise learn to communicate via alternative means such as sign language or in writing are denied this possibility with an emphasis only on verbal speech instruction, a skill they may never master. So, they may appear to have MR when in reality they may only have a severe disability in the area of verbal speech production. There are several members on wrongplanet.net who are nonverbal but who communicate beautifully via writing. A political issue? The founder of Autism Speaks admitted publicly that she considered a murder-suicide of her daughter with Autism but decided against it due to the well-being of her "normal" daughter. The most obvious outcome of genetic research is to allow the parents the option of aborting fetuses carrying the genes that predispose them to developing Autism. Many of the "behaviors" that are targeted for modification, such as hand-flapping, are not at all harmful for the person with Autism, but because it makes typical people uncomfortable, it is thought that it must be eradicated to help people with Autism "fit in." Persecuted much?

In short, it is awful to see a defender of one persecuted group angry that another group dares to ask for tolerance.

IMO the gay community has effectively WON its fight for recognition. There will always be bigots roaming around in a country where freedom of though and speech are protected, but by and large acceptance has been achieved. The marriage issue is just a final wrinkle to be ironed out, once that's done there really won't be anything left to b*tch about. Then you can take the fight to Iran.

Calling what we go through 'being teased' is an effing insult. Bullying and physical abuse are not teasing. Being told your condition does not exist is not in the least bit amusing. I got a chain email a few weeks ago purportedly written by a cop for CCW gun owners, flatly stating that he considered lack of eye contact to be a clear indicator of criminal behavior and/or insanity. Welcome to our world.

I don't even know where this whole notion of a correlation between the causes comes from. Autism is in no way related to being gay and I wouldn't want the issues associated, either, so nobody's 'leeching' that I can see and I'd protest if I thought they were.

Please go read about the use of aversives like electric skin shock on autistic people at the Judge Rotenberg Center. Read about the use of restraint and seclusion, which often leads to serious injury, psychological trauma and even death, on autistic people for the most minor of annoying behaviors in schools and institutions. Read about the way that even some psychiatrists and professors have come out and said that autistic people, or disabled people in general, are a burden on society and/or are not even human at all. Watch the videos made by charities that purport to help people with autism, in which parents talk disparagingly about their autistic children, including expressing the wish on camera to kill a child with autism. THEN tell me we don't need an autistic rights movement.

There is a very good reason for the comparison.

Decades ago, autism was not listed in the DSM but homosexuality was. Being gay was considered a form of "mental illness" to be cured. One of the primary methods attempted was ABA intervention, including aversion therapy (i.e. shock treatments). So-called "normal" people considered it a disease in need of a cure, or at the very least personal failing that it was the "weirdos" duty to keep hidden so it didn't affect everyone else around them. Sound familiar?

The neurodiversity movement sees that parallel and wants to know how aspies can start to gain acceptance the way the gay community has. Obviously, there is a long way to go, but it is not wrong for one group to want to follow in the footsteps of another one that has already gone where it wants to go.

Here in America, IDEA grants me the right to a "free and appropriate public education." I went five years without any formal education at all, and now that I have it (I'm likely to graduate high school a year late anyway; left largely to my own devices, I became quite an expert on fish and mental illness, but alas, these aren't part of the core curriculum), my parents have to pay out of pocket. That is not a "free and appropriate public education" by virtue of not being free. It didn't used to be appropriate, either, but that part's taken care of.

Someone needs to start subsidizing videogames for autistics, because they formed the biggest part of my therapy, such as it has been. I could've come out okay without the OT, but definitely not without the games. It would be much cheaper, too, so no complaining about budget.

Anyway, so yes. Denied benefits from the government.

And as for a major political issue... it may not be yet, but it will be. Besides, since when has not being important to the political stage meant something was unimportant to the people involved? Democracy wasn't that important an issue in 1100, but does that mean you should support monarchy?

It bugs me that people ignore the T in LGBT. Your above statement may apply to the gay rights movement in SOME areas (not all areas are tolerant at all). However, transgendered people still have major problems in society. There is also a disorder for them in the DSM still.

Also, more on topic, in addition to all of the responses to the original poster I would like to raise the issue of multiple differences. What about people who are LGBT and autistic? What about people who are autistic and have another disability or difference? That is two or more strikes against them in the eyes of society. The more accepting society becomes of differences of all sorts, the better for everyone.

Indeed. Then I guess we have to win recognition for all of them, so that none of the differences will be a strike against anyone.

The women's rights movement is over, we've won, and whereas I might have been in that category a few decades ago, now I'm just an Aspie. So the answer to "multiple differences" is "multiple Whatever Rights movements."

Hoo boy, you're kinda clueless about these issues, huh?

Okay, pertaining to human rights issues and autism, there are WAAAAY too many instances when autistic people have been and continue to be denied their basic human rights to count, so I will refer to a few examples:

Not all of these children are autistic, but this is an important example nonetheless: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1V53U3X ... re=related

The Judge Rotenburg Centre (which uses electric shock devices on their students): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9-xXfgQiTU

The National Autistic Society in the UK are also currently addressing human rights issues pertaining to autism (here's a few articles of interest: http://www.autism.org.uk/youneedtoknow
http://www.autism.org.uk/News-and-event ... ments.aspx
http://www.dontwritemeoff.org.uk/)

As for the deaths of autistics due to being autistic, well others here have already uploaded the lists already, so I don't need to get into that. Plus, anyone remember Nazi germany? A FUCKLOAD of people died because they were "undesirables" (including the mentally disabled, which includes people who would now be diagnosed with any form of autism).

Also, autism IS a major political issue. If a politician (for example) decides to cut benefits and funding for services for those with disabilities, that affects autistic people, which becomes an autism human rights issue. If a school is required to support the disabled but do not have a resources to accomodate for somebody on the spectrum, that's a political issue.

I mean, disability as a whole is a major political and social issue. I think that's really weird that you don't know that.

Oh, and as for the LGBT Pride Movement, how do you think we have become more tolerant towards non-heterosexuals? It's because of the gay rights/pride movement! Pride movements are there as a giant "f**k you! I ain't gonna be ashamed of myself just because you say so" to society, not as a way to say "I'm better than you!" (well, maybe for some people, but it certainly isn't why I agree with autism and LGBT pride).

One of the similarities between autism and being LGBTQ is the issue of invisibility. Most people with autism can choose to pass and pretend to be "normal". Most people with other disabilities don't have that option. Actually, most people who are marginalized don't have the option of invisibility. But a lot of autistics and a lot of folks in the LGBTQ community do. That raises a whole host of issues that most people don't have to deal with, including complicated identity crises and the question of coming out. There's also the whole isolation thing: a black person, for instance, will know pretty much from the beginning that they're black. Someone with high-functioning autism, or a gay person might only realize who they are over a long period of time. And in that period of time they might feel like there's nobody else like them on earth. This is something that almost no other community deals with.