Hi Judy,
a few things
first regarding free speech
1) the guy who teaches that the holocoust never happened (obviously a
wrong teaching) Irving is his name I think was denied a visum to enter
Australia like last year
2) THere are disability groups and individuals in Australia who wo9uld
like me to give some lectures in Australia on Bioethics and equality
rights. and they can't get the money together to get me over
This are just two examples where free speech is not really free speech. In
the first case anactive limitation equivalent to the situation that the
german government would actively prohibit Singer from entering Germany
(which never happened). So obviously free speech stops somewhere.
and the second is about distribution of speech. Disabled groups for thew
most part have not much money. Obviously people who like Singer's ideas
and work have no problem in finding money to invite Singer all over the
world. This is an unevenness as to who hears whom and in that way free
speech becomes a tool for the powerful to justify themselves
Regarding the genetic eugenic deselection issue
1) Genetics has nothing to do with abortion if you do preimplantation
testing the deselection process happens on the stage of a cell.
2) Disability groups do not get much support from other human rights
groups (e.g.gay/lesbian/bisexuals, women,) on that issue. If, we actually
see an animal farm philosophy (some are more equal than others) appearing
in this context like testing for my characteristic is wrong but testing
for their characteristic is right (see Ed Stein in Bioethics Dec. 1998 and
proposed Canadian legislation and the Canadian Royal Commission Report on
NRT). Look at my article health Canada submission on my webpage.
What should disabled peple do to confront people like Singer?
We can't do it on academic level (we are just not enough academics out
there.
We can't do it through lectures as we don't have the resources to lecture
and inform even our own people extensively
We can't do it through the media
In Germany to that time the disabled people felt they only had one way to
block him from speaking.
By the way. I find it dqangerous to focuss to much on Singer as there are
many USA bioethicists who write for decades he same as what Singer
writes(Joseph Fletcher Tristam Engelhardt to name just two.)
Cheers
Gregor
webpage: http://www.thalidomide.ca/gwolbring
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