I’m writing this with tears in my eyes. My tears are from frustration and from a form of anger and, dare I say, hate that I feel toward certain people at this moment. I just read about yet another autistic child killed by his mother. This time, the mother (allegedly) threw the child off a bridge.
Previous murders, and attempted murders, have been just as horrifying, but this one strikes me as particularly horrible because of the manner of death of the child. The child, who was a living, breathing human being with conciousness and self-awareness, who felt joy over seeing his parents reunited, was thrown off a bridge to his death in the river below. That takes planning. That takes time. His mother (allegedly) took him up to the bridge and then launched him to his death.
What was the child thinking? When he was dropping to the river, what were his thoughts?
I find myself begging and pleading to any higher authority in this universe that the child had no idea what was going on, and that his death was immediate upon hitting the water. That is the only kind of “fairness” I’d ask of God or a god.
My frustration grows even more when I realize that the Autism “false prophets” will likely use this tragic crime to bring attention to themselves and their pet projects and not to the thousands of autistic (and other special needs) children who need us to not waste money and time on chasing false causes of autism and funding false cures. Can you imagine if the money spent to buy congresspeople was donated to the family in question? That child would have likely not been killed like that.
“He said the son had Asperger’s syndrome, had trouble making friends and had been receiving professional help.”
Let’s make it clear to anyone that tries to pin his rampage on his autism that autistics are far more likely to be the victims of violence than to be the perpetrators of violence. All the evidence states that someone who “snaps” and kills people and is autistic didn’t do it because of the autism but because of all the other things that happen in the mind of someone who “snaps.” All things equal, neurotypical people are more likely to be those who “snap,” but society likes answers to questions about monsters. There will be plenty who will point to this young man’s autism and say that the answer to his horrible actions is his autism. They did it with Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Elementary shooter.
The truth is that the answer to why there are monsters in the world is more complex than that. And you’ll be very likely to be very wrong if you bet that the answer is autism.
The Canary Party, an anti-vaccine political action group, has hit a new low. On Saturday, First Lady Michelle Obama posted a picture of herself holding a sign that read “#BringBackOurGirls”. It was a reference to the 200+ young women in Nigeria who were kidnapped by an Islamist terrorist group and are now in danger of being sold off as slaves or suffer much worse fates. So what does the Canary Party do with that? This:
That’s right. In their twisted minds, autistic children are suffering the equivalent of being kidnapped at gun point, dragged into the jungle, physically and mentally tormented, and being sold off into slavery. And we wonder why parents of autistic children kill those children in the most heinous of ways? Why organizations and individuals in the anti-vaccine groups whitewash those murders and defend the alleged and confessed murderers of those kids?
I call on all the parents of autistic children who see their children as being in a state of despair beyond comprehension and beyond help to give up those children to child welfare, to foster parents, to relatives who do not see those children as “missing”, “lost”, “dead”, or “gone”. Give those children a chance to fill with joy and purpose the lives of better people than those of you who feed them chelation chemicals, bleach enemas, and all other sorts of quackery. Walk away from them because you’re not doing them any favors. You’re not making their lives better.
Do it quickly, because another autistic child murdered because of your ideology is one too many.
I’ve written to you before about the anti-vaccine, so-called autism advocates who have tried to justify/whitewash the murder of Alex Spourdalakis. In their minds, a parent who is unable to take care of their developmentally delayed (and, in the case of Alex, disabled) child are justified if they murder said child. Why? What would justify murder? Why, it’s the lack of funds to give that child care by quacks, liars and thieves. When Alex was found murdered in a most heinous manner, the so-called autism advocates (those who say there is an epidemic when there is none and seemingly blame nothing but vaccines) said, “Oh, poor mother, poor caretaker, they had no other choice.”
Tell any reasonable person out there that there are some ideas that should be controlled, and they will likely have some sort of an opposing reaction to your statement. Especially here in the West, we detest the idea of controlling who says what and where. There is the cliché of not yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater, of course. But, for pretty much other ideas and forms of speech, we very much like it when the government stays out of our way. I certainly would not like it if they shut down this blog.
But being free from government interference does not mean that you are free from the consequences of your thoughts and actions. For example, the idea that a child is “lost” or “dead” due to autism can and has had serious consequences. When a mother and a caretaker viciously murdered an autistic boy, they were defended by certain individuals to the point where the murder was whitewashed. They tried to reason that the mother and the caretaker had no choice but to, in a sense, put the boy out of his misery. Only that, it wasn’t the boy that was in misery, per se. It was the mother and caretaker. They couldn’t take the hand that they were dealt and they committed a most brutal act of savagery. Who knows if they thought their actions were justified because, hey, the autistic boy was already “good as dead”.
Today I read yet another story where someone was fed an idea and they acted on it:
“An Oregon mom has been accused of beating her 4-year-old son until his intestines ripped in two places — just because she thought he was gay.
Prosecutors say Jessica Dutro, 25, repeatedly subjected three of her children to traumatic beatings at the Washington County homeless shelter where they lived. But little Zachary Dutro-Boggess bore the brunt of his mom’s volatile temper, Oregon Live reports.“
She thought her 4 year-old was gay, so she killed him? Yes, and she left plenty of evidence:
“In a Facebook message that is now being used as evidence against her, Dutro reportedly told her 24-year-old boyfriend Brian Canady that Zachary had made her mad. The boy was “facing the wall” as punishment.
Using a slur, Dutro wrote that her son was going to be gay.
“He walks and talks like it. Ugh,” the mom wrote.”
Now, where would someone get an idea like that? An idea that states that a child of that age could display homosexual tendencies? An idea that states that a homosexual person is less of a human being than the rest of us and, thus, killing them is justified?
“In one study of sixty effeminate boys aged four to eleven, 98 percent of them engaged in cross-dressing, and 83 percent said they wished they had been born a girl.
The fact is, there is a high correlation between feminine behavior in boyhood and adult homosexuality. There are telltale signs of discomfort with . . . boys and deep-seated and disturbing feelings that they [are] different and somehow inferior. And yet parents often miss the warning signs and wait too long to seek help for their children. One reason for this is that they are not being told the truth about their children’s gender confusion, and they have no idea what to do about it.
Perhaps you are concerned about your child and his or her “sexual development.” Maybe your son or daughter is saying things like, “I must be gay,” or “I’m bisexual.” You’ve found same-sex porn in his room or evidence that he has accessed it on the Internet. You’ve found intimate journal entries about another girl in her diary. The most important message I can offer to you is that there is no such thing as a “gay child” or a “gay teen.” [But] left untreated, studies show these boys have a 75 percent chance of becoming homosexual or bisexual.”
Ah, my bad. There is no such thing as a “gay child” in this man’s understanding, but children who act “that way” have a high chance of being homosexual or bisexual when they grow up. Maybe the mother in question feared for her child’s future? Because, you know, being gay is a horrible, horrible thing:
“These kids often recognize very early in life that they are “different” from other boys. They may cry easily, be less athletic, have an artistic temperament and dislike the roughhousing that their friends enjoy. Some of them prefer the company of girls, and they may walk, talk, dress and even “think” effeminately. This, of course, brings rejection and ridicule from the “real boys,” who tease them unmercifully and call them “queer,” “fag,” and “gay.” Even when parents are aware of the situation, they typically have no idea how to help. By the time the adolescent hormones kick in during early adolescence, a full-blown gender-identity crisis threatens to overwhelm the teenager. This is what Mark was experiencing when he wrote. And it illustrates why even boys with normal heterosexual tendencies are often terrified that they will somehow “turn gay.””
Could they be terrified because people like Dobson (and his “Focus on the Family” group) have made homosexuality sound like a curse, a disease? Could it be because there are others who say things like:
“I’m guessing the majority of American parents don’t want their little boys turning into sodomites, at this point. if you were to interview, stick a microphone in front of most parents dropping their kids off at the average K-6 school in Colorado where they’re sporting their GLSEN signs everywhere, but if you just interview them and you ask them: “Is your vision for this little 6-year-old boy, 8-year-old boy, 9-year-old, 10-year-old boy that he turn into a sodomite?” My guess is that 60 to 70 percent of them would say, “that would be my worst nightmare.””
That would be their worst nightmare? Not that their child may be dragged away and beaten to a pulp in a field because of something they cannot control? If that’s the case, then I don’t want to live in that society.
Thankfully, we don’t live in that society much anymore. People in the United States are coming around and accepting of people who are not completely heterosexual. Unfortunately, homophobia is on the rise in other parts of the world like Russia and in some countries in the African continent. And for what? What is the fear? That we’ll all turn gay?
We’re all a little gay:
I hope that Pedro (not her real name) and I are the kinds of parents who would not be “shocked and depressed” if one of our children turned out to be gay, because real parents don’t do that. Real parents make the home the safest place for their children, a place where their children can be anything and anyone and not have to fear the big bad world out there. It’s already a scary world as it is.
Yeah, I was not supposed to come back to the blog until Sunday. In fact, that blog post has already been written. It’s just that something came to my attention today, and you, my two or three readers, must know about it right now. It is almost an emergency because it is placing children in harm’s way.
I’m talking about this report from CBS. I need to warn you that it is very hard to look at. It has images of a child with autism by the name of Alex being mistreated and it describes in some detail how his mother and his caretaker killed him. The most infuriating part of the report is that, in my opinion, it attempts to explain why the child was killed, completely forgetting that a child was killed. Giving the mother and caretaker’s difficulties in having the child treated, the report, to me, tries to justify what they did. And, in my humble opinion, now puts it out there that it is okay to kill your neurodevelopmentally delayed child if he or she becomes too much of a burden to you.
If you don’t do so already, I highly suggest that you read the daily postings by Orac over at Respectful Insolence and by his “friend” over at Science Based Medicine. You’ll learn a lot about critical thinking and how it can be applied to the anti-science movement. Today’s post at RI was a rough one to read. It had to do with the death of a child with autism at the hands of his mother and of his caretaker. The long and short of it is that the mother and the caretaker of the child could not deal with his autism (and the behavior resulting from the autism) and so decided to kill him. His murder was appalling in itself, but the way they went about it was brutal.
Within the comments section of that blog post was this comment (with my emphases in bold):
“i agree with t’s comment.
i understand the opinion isn’t popular with people who have severely autistic/disabled children – but the only responses those people have provided to t’s logical post, are purely emotion-based.
lilady – i’m very sorry for your loss, but even you can’t provide any way that society benefited from pouring resources into keeping your severely disabled child alive for 28 years – only that you loved him and were happy to have him in *your* life for that time.
the money put into those services doesn’t magically appear – it comes from tax-paying citizens and their businesses, and it is a finite resource. the money spent on severely disabled people – who, without sugar-coating, are of absolutely no benefit to society as a whole – would be better spent improving education, healthcare, infrastructure, etc… for those who are able to put back into the system.”
Yes, that’s our “lilady” that he is addressing. And, if I may be “emotional” for a second, I would slap him across the face for talking to her that way. But I digress… Continue reading →
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