a new interesting petition from neurodiversity

I have just come across a new interesting online petition from some people who apparently don't like autism speaks. The petition is entitled. Autism Speaks is a Joke.

You might realize the code to eventually be able to abort autistic births for the sake of health care costs but i say it's still barbaric. We are not puzzle
peices nor a reason to be cured. Cureing should be reserved for bad things. There is nothing bad about Autism it makes us special, smarter, proof of great things... etc. How dare anyone would assume different. How normal do you have to be to live in this world? Such a company will unleash murder of anyone who isn't functioning like a person should and that died out with Hitler years ago. Do we want to be the next abu dhabi injustice?!
Be careful how you put things across or it could backfire!!

On another part of the site the petition is explained.

We the undersigned beg you to reconsider your idea of how to deal with or talk about Autism/economy. Please make abortion illigal just in case and keep an eye on how word spreads.

Interestingly enough these people say that cures should only be for bad things. They claim that not being able to make a living, meeting your significant other, not being able to speak, not being able to get a decent education in a regular school setting, behaving in disruptive fashion, having self-injurious behaviors that can permanently cripple a person, being at risk for being run over by a car or killed, having phobias, having uncontrollable self-stimulations, not being able to engage in goal directed activities, having motor impairments that prevent you from being able to handwrite properly, not having friends and in some cases being violent, in some cases committing crimes is not a bad thing.

They also state the old cliche about autism making someone superior instead of handicapped.It would seem that in this person's case autism did not make them smarter. Check out the rhetoric, particularly the spelling of 'illegal'. If this is an example of of someone who was made smarter or superior by autism, I would hate to see someone for whom autism was not a gift from God. I would think in addition to wanting a cure for autism whoever wrote this petition would want a cure for illiteracy as well since they do not seem terribly literate from what they wrote on the petition.

It is old propaganda, the abortion shtick and the equating those of us who wish a cure to being nazis. And the old reaction-formation induced assertion that autism is great, a gift that makes people superior instead of handicapped. So far, they have 5 signatures, they want 1,000, so only 995 to go until they reach their goal.

Though I do not agree with the body of the petition, I do agree with the title. Autism speaks is a joke. They have given a grant of half a million dollars recently to the infamous Laurent Mottron, a medical doctor who doubles as a researcher and states that autism is not harmful, it is not a dysfunction but merely a difference and states that curing autism is nonsensical and instead of trying to find ways to help persons with autism uses the huge amount of research funding he receives to prove how smart and how great autistic people are. Though his research subjects are most likely made up of mostly very high functioning persons with autism. Given that this man and his sidekicks, Morton Gernsbacher and Michelle Dawson, are the darlings of the ND movement, I would think they would be delighted with AS rather than rebuking them. I think AS has $20 million in assets designated for scientific funding. So, 2.5% of their funding goes to a neurodiversity concern. Autism speaks also funds research into thimerosal in spite of all the evidence against it causing autism, has Sally Bernard on their board of directors, spends tons of money on advertising claiming that if insurance reform is implemented this will enable autistic children to have playdates and friends, has a campaign encouraging people to hire autistics as employees in the workplace, yet not employing a single person with autism in their organization, not even as a minimum wage file clerk, and apparently has collaborated with William Stillman in their school package, a self-diagnosed Asperger's person, who claims that autism was created by divine providence and without any formal qualifications and credentials, charges $100 an hour for a phone consultation for an autistic child. Stillman also states that in 5-10 years the autism prevalence will be 1/10. Their president, Mark Rothmeier, not long ago stated that autism affected 1.5 million children. After Michelle Dawson pointed out this error using data culled from the epidemiological literature on autism as well as recent U.S. population statistics, the word children was edited out of the article. To borrow from Richard Nixon, AS gave Dawson the sword and she stuck it in and twisted it with relish.

Indeed a great title for a petition! So sad that the body of the petition was such cliched nonsense written by someone not terribly literate who would have the actual audacity to claim that autism makes people superior and/or gifted. Of course this might have been someone quite young who wrote this, as we see from one post I recently wrote that for certain reasons, neurodiversity attempts to proselytize those who are as young and naive as possible.