Addressing the Crank Room

I was asked last November to speak, along with several others of differing viewpoints,  for five to ten minutes to the Atlanta Autism Consortium about my perspective on the push to get an autism insurance bill through the Georgia legislature this session. My minority opinion, presented to the behaviorist-dominated room at the Marcus Center, was that anything that can be done to keep another buck from going to the behaviorists would definitely be worth the effort. This is the text of what I said:

My name is Walt Guthrie. And I'm an advocate for those on the spectrum.

This year, I had the distinct privilege of working with Carmen Allen, and others, to kill SB 161 in the Georgia Legislature.

Next year, should the participants in this room succeed in introducing an insurance bill into the state assembly, I look forward to the opportunity to participate in the killing of that as well.

It is not that I object to children who might very well be in need of  a specialized education or specific therapies receiving financial assistance to meet those needs. I do not.

It is, rather, that I know that any bill that this collection of organizations --primarily Autism Speaks and the Marcus Center -- has any hand in either crafting or supporting, will be weighted primarily, if not in its entirety, towards ABA and other similar dehumanizing pseudo-scientific behavorial applications.

Autism Speaks is an organization loathed by large sections of the autistic community for their efforts to equate the autistic spectrum with cancer and AIDS. In ad after ad and billboard after billboard, they paint a picture of the autistic experience in terms of pure negativity, even assuring that autistic children will be responsible for their parents' future divorce. Their work  recalls the propaganda of Julius Streicher in the Third Reich, depicting Jews as rats and vermin, laying the moral groundwork for their
extermination.

Autism Speaks, in their support for genetic research, suggests they are inclined towards a somewhat softer genocide: Prenatal testing that will result in a genetic search and destroy that, once the markers for autism have been established and located and the tests drawn up, will result in a "cure" for autism by simply eliminating future generations of autistics from being born.

THESE are the people that the Marcus Center wishes to partner with.

The Marcus Center would have us believe that the autistic insurance teat should be doled out primarily for the behaviorists to suck on. Because, after all, ABA is "science."

In all the time that I have come here I don't believe that I have ever encountered any science, or found anyone who would actually qualify as a "scientist." They use words like "disorder" and they don't know what they mean or why they use them. Ask them and they might mumble that the DSM "says" it is. But they can't tell you why. To paraphrase the creation-scientist: "The DSM says it, I believe it, and that settles it." A few, like James McPartland, admit it's definitional. It's all made up. This is the foundation of their whole existence and they just made it up. Out of thin air. 

They focus on differences and transform them, with a wave of the hand, into deficits. If autistics do surprisingly better than was expected on a test measuring this skill or that brain function then this becomes the brain somehow "compensating." They put laser pointers on children to find out where they're looking. If regular kids look at eyes and autistic kids look at mouths then the conclusion is naturally that looking at mouths is a trait that must be corrected. Why? Because being on the autistic spectrum is definitionally a disorder so the behaviors exhibited by those on the spectrum must all be symptoms of that disorder. Nothing autistic can be good.

They make it their mission to change behavior because, in their narrow world, behavior is all that can be measured and measurement is all. They make no attempt to empathically understand the interior emotional and intellectual world of the autistic. In the words of Dan Crimmins that would be all "touchy-feely."
As a result, I'm sure, of such a philosophy, I regularly have such encounters here as one Marcus Center employee comparing her working with children on the spectrum to the training of dogs.

Their lack of intellectual curiousity here is stunning. They talk endlessly about why autustics do the things they do, such as avoiding eye contact and yet when queried if they actually asked those on the spectrum why they don't make eye contact, they'll respond that THAT wouldn't be science. Imagine. Asking people why they do what they do is methodologically off limits. No, children will instead have their behavior coercively altered based on theories derived from cherry-picked data designed to fit the behaviorists' bigoted preconceptions.

If the behaviorists in this room were real scientists, they would be incompetent. Some of my colleagues in this fight believe they ARE incompetent. I believe, on the whole, that they are, politely put, engaged in willful misrepresentation. But whether their lies are to themselves or to the public at large, the children on the spectrum deserve better than to have their lives entrusted to them.

The people in this room, specifically  those associated with the Marcus Center, do not have the best interests of the autistic community at heart. They are engaged in fraud at multiple levels. Whatever legislation they concoct to further enrich themselves should, and will, be met with ...skepticism.




By the way, I'm not very popular at these meetings.