The American Bar Association Calls Out the LSAC for Its Disability Discrimination

Now, I should start by saying I have personal experience with all of this, which I will share some about in a moment.  But let me provide some background first.

The ABA sets standards for accreditation of law schools.  As of this moment, they require every single school to consider scores on the Law School Admission Test a.k.a. the LSAT.  The organization that administers it is the Law School Admissions Council, a.k.a. the LSAC.

And they are out and out bigots, at least toward people who have disabilities.  As I have shared at this blog, I have three learning disabilities.  I have faced severe discrimination because of those disabilities, so extreme that I ended up dropping out of high school.  It was what you would call hostile environment discrimination—that is making a person’s life hell until they walk away.  This was, of course, before the ADA existed.  Then a few years afterward, I decided to make a second go at obtaining an education.  I received accommodations on the GED exam, the SAT, the ACT and throughout my entire undergraduate education.  And indeed, I received the same accommodations throughout law school and on the bar exam.

In each case, the accommodations granted were identical and were tailored to my specific disabilities.  I will avoid the long discussion of each disability and the justification for the specific accommodation, but I will note that all of these institutions agreed that I should receive the same accommodations: double time, isolation, use of earplugs, and if the test had a significant written portion, access to a computer.  But when I made the same request to the LSAC they sent me back a letter denying the request for extra time.  That is right, they literally didn’t even address my full request and every effort to get them to even address it failed.  Later I verified that the letter they sent me was in fact a form letter—and a poorly-worded one at that—suggesting that as a practice they automatically rejected an entire class of requests for accommodations.

So I took them to court seeking a preliminary injunction against them forcing them to administer the test with accommodations.  After the test occurred, there would be a full trial on whether those accommodations were justified, and therefore whether they were required to score the exam and release those scores.

At the preliminary injunction hearing, their attorney made an outright bigoted argument, asserting that I was just faking these disabilities.  Anyone who actually deals with me would realize how ludicrous it was—it was almost as ridiculous as accusing a man in wheelchair with clearly underdeveloped legs of faking paralysis.  For instance, one of my three disabilities is dysgraphia.  That term describes a number of disorders, but in my case, it is an impairment in my fine motor skills that makes it so that it is very hard to write by hand; however, if you put me before a computer, I am pretty much normal.  It doesn’t affect my ability to form content, just to actually put it down on paper, by hand.  Because of this disability, my handwriting was frozen, developmentally speaking, at the eighth grade level.  And this idiot lawyer for the LSAC was claiming that I was faking that—indeed that I could fake that.

The Devil and Daniel Webster*

Imao once said that Alan Grayson (D-unce) “really is what would happen if you grabbed a random internet troll and made him a Congressman.”  And my gosh he has been living up to this.  His latest ad was so dishonest that he was challenged on MSNBC for making it.  Yes, MSNBC.  No, that is not a typo.  And it feels as weird to write it as I am sure you think it is to read it.  Hot Air has the video and links to why Grayson is being a lying shit.

The short version is this.  Once his opponent, Daniel Webster, said in a prayer meeting that the married men in attendance should pick out verses from the bible to contemplate.  He said “Don’t pick the ones that say, ‘She should submit to me.’”

Grayson then took that clip and cut out the part that says “Don’t pick the ones that say” and left in “She should submit to me.”  And based on that, called this man “Taliban Dan.”  Why do I suspect that Kos is coaching him?

I appreciate the media calling him out on this, but I will add that the correct thing to say is that Grayson is lying.  He is stating that the man said X, when in fact he said “not X.”  This would almost certainly be considered defamation in a court of law.

Of course this follows another ad that basically picked on the man for having a disability.  As Factcheck reports, Grayson had a previous ad claiming Webster was a draft dodger, and had the narrator claim that Webster didn’t love America like he did.  Gee, I thought Democrats didn’t like it when you questioned their patriotism?

The Fallacy of Assuming Everyone Thinks Like You (or “Fisking Keith Olbermann”)

Yeah, several posts ago I wondered if it was necessary to fisk Olbermann, but I am compelled to, here.

But first let me tell you a story.  Now I have said that I support affirmative action in a limited sort of way, based on the present reality of racism and other forms of bigotry.  And I remember saying that once in a Constitutional History class back when I was an undergraduate and a man vehemently disagreed with me that racism was a real problem.  He said something like this:

I don’t think racism is so bad.  At my fraternity, a black guy wanted to join.  And one guy said we shouldn’t let him join because he was black.  So I stood up and said that the fact he was black didn’t matter.  And we voted to let him in.

That’s a paraphrase, of course.  And this is what I said in response.

OMG, Did you Hear what Rahm Emanuel said?

So White House Chief of staff was talking strategy with liberal democrats and when they suggested going after conservative democrats he called them, or the idea, “fucking retarded.”

So then, Sarah Palin is facebooking about this, getting angry at him using retarded in a pejorative sense.

Well first off, I defend any mother’s right to be ferocious in defense of her young.  I call it Momma Bear syndrome.  I always felt that this was what was going on when Palin made her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2008.  If you remember they had announced she was the Vice Presidential nominee, and then the Democrats went after her with frankly a viciousness I had never seen before in politics.  I mean the phrase The Wilding of Sarah Palin describes the lunatic attacks on her and her family better than any other phrase I had read.

On Ricci v. DeSteffano (a.k.a. the New Haven Firefighters case)

Yeah, yeah, I know this issue is like so 2009.  I mean it came out last April for frick’s sake.  But I felt I had something to contribute and I thought I would do it, now.

We should start by talking about the facts.  You can read the whole opinion, here.  But this is the short version, with me editorializing a little.

Basically in New Haven they decided that it was time to have an examination to determine who should be promoted in the firefighter ranks.  They went to great lengths to ensure that African Americans did well, but when they got the results back, they said, more or less, “oh shit.  Too many white people got the best scores.”  So then they decided to throw out the scores.

So Ricci and most of the other firefighters up for a promotion sued.  The city defended its conduct on the theory that their test had a disparate impact and thus if they didn’t throw it out, they would be sued.

Now, first, let’s dispose of something important.  This was racial discrimination.  They were ready to promote based on this test until they realized that they didn’t like the color of who did best.  That is racial discrimination, pure and simple.  That doesn’t end the inquiry, mind you, because not all racial discrimination is automatically illegal, but let’s get that part right.

Impossible*

In my last post I said it was impossible for me to learn another language, and then put an asterisk with the word “impossible.”  That is because, well, that is a tiny bit of bullshit.  Let me tell you something about disabled culture.  Sometimes we use that word “impossible” when something is not literally impossible.  Like to give an example, a paraplegic, that is a man who can’t move his legs, might say it is impossible for him to climb stairs.  But that isn’t usually true.  Often they can drag their bodies up using just their arms.  What they really mean, then, is that it is so ridiculously difficult that whatever the reward is couldn’t possibly be worth it.

In that sense I meant it was impossible for me to learn a foreign language.  As in, it is so ridiculously difficult, it can’t be worth it.

Just to clear the air.  So I am not bullshitting you.  At least not for very long.