I approached my research with
every intention of writing something worthy of the New York Times. To refresh
your memory, that I was going to
I last wrote that I was going to look on the websites of all candidates to
check their platforms about their positions on disability issues. I was also
going to go through several databases and find articles from journals,
magazines and newspapers that discussed these issues. That looks pretty
clear-cut doesn't it?
Well, I started with Republican
candidates and checked the Gingrich, Romney, and Santorum platforms. Since they
were quite long, I limited myself to the health-care portion of each figuring
that both myself and blog readers would be more interested in the health care
related disability issues. I scanned about 30 pages worth of information and
became frustrated when I could not find any mention of disability.
I decided to switch to the
databases. I used InfoTrac and a newspaper database to start. I searched the
candidate' s name linked with the wildcard version of the word disability so
that all forms of the word would be found, such as disabled and disability. The
search string looked like this:
Gingrich AND disab$
When I found very few articles
that were relevant after trying each Republican candidate, I have to reach
certain conclusions. Other than an article about Santorum's claim that
contraception is a way to cull the disabled at birth, I found very little. I
started out on this research quest because I thought that I had a mistaken
belief that the disabled community seemed inconsequential to the candidates.
Although I may be inclined to revisit this project again at a later date, and
in spite of the fact that I didn't get to the Democratic side of the issue, I
have to say that the assumption that I went into this with seems to be correct.
The next question is what do we as a community
want to do about it? Feel free to comment on this blog post about your
thoughts. I gave you mine…
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