Jim Sinclair (activist)
autism rights activist
Jim Sinclair is an autism rights movement activist.
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Quotes
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- Well, I know for a fact that there are at least some parents who are not unhappy and miserable about having autistic children, and do not want their children cured--though they'll move mountains to get appropriate education and support programs for their children. I have yet to hear of even one parent of a child with cystic fibrosis or cancer who would be content to have a dead child, just as long as the child got good educational and support services.
- There is no inherent conflict between accepting and working with autism on one hand, and promoting increased skill development on the other. It is the role of all teachers, counselors, and therapists to promote growth and learning. For professionals working with autistic people, the important issue is that autistic people should be assisted in growing and developing into more capable autistic people, not pushed to become like non-autistic people.
- If you understand life, you know that it wants to continue. If you feel life throbbing under your touch, you know it’s desecration to set your hand to stop that living pulse. If you love something, you don’t kill it.
- There’s a special technique involved in tying a hangman’s noose so the victim is killed instantly by a broken neck, rather than slowly by strangulation. I suppose it’s part of a hangman’s professional expertise to learn to tie this knot properly. That expertise doesn’t make the hangman a caring or compassionate person.
- The hangman’s knot, the guillotine, the electric chair, the gas chamber, and the lethal injection were all designed to make deliberately inflicted death less painful to the victim. But I’ve never heard the inventors or the users of these technologies hailed as great humanitarians. I’ve never heard them praised for their great empathy toward the lives they’ve ended.
"Don't Mourn for Us" (1993)
edit- in Our Voice, the Autism Network International newsletter, Volume 1, Number 3, 1993 Full text online
- When parents say,
- I wish my child did not have autism,
- what they're really saying is,
- I wish the autistic child I have did not exist, and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead. ...
- This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for a cure. This is what we know, when you tell us of your fondest hopes and dreams for us: that your greatest wish is that one day we will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces.
- You didn't lose a child to autism. You lost a child because the child you waited for never came into existence. That isn't the fault of the autistic child who does exist, and it shouldn't be our burden. We need and deserve families who can see us and value us for ourselves, not families whose vision of us is obscured by the ghosts of children who never lived. Grieve if you must, for your own lost dreams. But don't mourn for us. We are alive. We are real. And we're here waiting for you.
