In 2015, Jim Patterson helped open a two day conference on the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 at UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.
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Jim holds Alex's photograph.
Photo Courtesy UC Hastings
Alex Baker Patterson was born in 1989 at Georgetown University Hospital. She required immediate cardiac surgery and lived to be 17. She was awaiting a heart transplant.
The case, called family tree discrimination by the Wall Street Journal, was the first of its kind in the federal government. It was a case of associational discrimination based on disability. It was my parental association with Alex that led the US State Department to violate the ADA in 1993 when it attempted to remove me from the diplomatic corps due to the "insurance burden" they said Alex represented. When I told Justin W. Dart Jr. of this, he replied: "The goddamn bastards!" My tribute to Justin is published elsewhere.
Patterson updated Alex's story with Deanna Fei's experience, "Girl in Glass," at AOL in 2011 and the politician in Cornwall England who told citizens disabled kids, like disabled animals, should be "put down." In both cases, "distressed babies" were insurance burdens. A global problem and the remnant "mainstreaming" of Eastern European institutionalization of disabled kids and adults.
The State Department experience, documented in several newspapers and magazines of the 1990s and in many interviews since, sent a horrible message to the nation that disabled children and their parents were without value. It also sent the message that if State diplomats would take such extreme actions against one of their own, counter to prevailing law, US diplomats might be expected to mistreat disabled people and children in other countries. It further cast doubt on the compassion, sincerity and honesty, diplomats state they have in negotiating with counterparts abroad and in fairly implementing US programs to diverse international communities.
The ADA contained a provision that barred such discrimination. I knew this because I worked with disability leaders in the years before passage of the ADA. The provision was needed to protect family members with AIDS, it was a case of AIDS activism in the ADA, which "Uncle Jesse" Helms opposed, that protected working parents with disabled family members. In July 1994, Helms, in a long Senate speech broadcast over C-SPAN, attempted to have me fired for "promoting the gay agenda" in the federal workplace. To say those were trying times is to state it mildly.
The ADA became fully applicable to federal employees in late October 1993. The Neal Pike Institute said the government decision finding associational discrimination, in 1995, was consistent with the Federal Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the direction to disability law.
Patterson's presentation included remembrances of Dart, Even Kemp Jr., Paul Hearn, Alan Reich, Yvonne Duffy (Detroit Free Press), Harold Russell, Helen Keller, George H,. W. Bush, and colleagues and childhood friends with disabilities. And many Miss Wheelchair Americas.
He also quoted some of his supporters including US Senator Charles Grassley, IA-R, Mary Johnson, editor of The Disability Rag, Bill Stothers of Mainstream magazine, Betty Garee of Special Living Magazine in Illinois, and many others.
Late in 2015 while attending a conference in Los Angeles, Jim knelt at Harold Russell's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for a photo in memory of the 2-time Oscar winner. Patterson also posed at the star for the late Billy Barty, a giant of a man. Patterson met Barty at a Little People's Convention in Indianapolis. They were both were kind to me and shared invaluable personal and professional
insights.
Russell told me men were "uncomfortable" shaking hands with him. (He lost both forearms in WWII.) "I am not that kind of man," I told him, as I proudly shook his hand after a meeting in Washington.
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