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Table of Contents
Then god seperated the state from the church
Secularization
Issues of their times
Jehovah's Witlesses
Christianity
Science
Woman
Overton Window
Malcolm X
We're not burning witches anymore, so we are secular
The "rational" people over at RationalWiki have an article on Ableism.
Ableism describes the expression, perpetuation or enforcement of systems, structures or sentiments that give an advantage to or favor people considered “able” (bodied or minded), or discriminates against those that are not. Topics relevant to the field of Ableism range far and wide asking some genuinely useful questions, starting at “stairs”, going over things like career prospects of disabled people (ie. “disability discrimination”) and ending at philosophy, a delightfully explosive minefield of semantics. Is there such a thing as an “able” person? Are we really meant to have two legs? Don't say a person with just one leg is at a disadvantage, that is ableist and discriminatory as it raises people with two legs over people with just one! A person with one leg is different-abled, because while you can do things they can't, they can do things that you can't.
Basically, if you like the occasional discussion and dabble in philosophical questions, but don't want things to get too heated, this is your cue to turn around. You are staring at a dark, all-consuming abyss, and it is reaching out to you. Many before you have fallen and became a victim of the hate cycle that is the aggressive injection of exclusionarily inclusiveness into otherwise reasonable and goal-oriented discussions, under the guise of “inclusiveness” so that one can get “rightfully” pissed at people for not being un-uninclusive enough.
Still, odds are that once society has developed beyond the current trans people moral panic, ableism will be the next big wedge issue used by conservatives to point at the liberals who try to ruin our society all the time.
The Beginnings
You know, it all starts peaceful. People with disability are discriminated against. Discrimination hurts people without a good reason, so we work to stop it. So, the people doing this mean well, until one day, criticism. A member of the anti-discrimination movement needs to defend their perspective! Watch on cue, 3, 2, 1, radicalization! Pushed, with or without good arguments, on their beliefs ever further, the anti-discrimination movement needs to take a step back to explain their beliefs. Pushed on that, they need to explain the belief explaining their belief, and this arguments gets heated and more theoretical as it goes on, without anybody making any progress whatsoever, until we end up at the very fabric of our reality and our understanding of words. Some stay sane and remain focused on what they were originally here for, stopping discrimination against disabled people, others stare at the abyss for too long. For them, it is now the second coming of christ, the call to the next great crusade against the conservatives and anyone else they can get away with shitting on.
This is a very important distinction - ableism is a real thing and it needs to be combatted. But the useful discussion about “giving disabled people as much quality of life as everyone else, because they too deserve to live a fulfilled existence with control and agency” definitely ends where semantics begin, where it is no longer about the interests (“I want to help disabled people”, “I want to design X in a way to make it very accessible”) but rather about Words (“Saying that people are normally born with two arms is ableist!”).