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Paul Grobstein's picture

Diversity and deviance, to John Elder Robison, and others ....

Submitted by Paul Grobstein on Sat, 02/28/2009 - 7:32pm.

Delighted to have you drop by, and leave your thoughts. I'm more than happy to agree that the "culture" (or at least some part if it) is more accepting of certain kinds of differences/deviances than it used to be.  And pleased that it is for you (and others) it is "a different place" than it was "30 years ago."  

We do indeed make progress of particular fronts.  What concerns me is that we don't seem to generalize those understandings.  We still tend to presume automatically that deviance is to be equated with disability.  I'd like to see us reach a point where we start instead with the presumption that difference/deviance is valuable, and come instead to the conclusion that a particular deviance is a problem only if/when we have acquired observations indicating that that is so. 

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