Mary Johnson

“The complaint against disability rights continued year after year. Rarely rebutted, it was made with equanimity, with self righteousness, because after all, "no one is against the handicapped." The claim that disability rights cost too much, that it hurt non-disabled people, that it warred against common sense, that it allowed people who weren't truly disabled the benefit of its special rights, that it, yes, hurt disabled people themselves, was only made for the disabled's own good, said the critics. No one is against the handicapped.
This was paternalism, the particular cloak bigotry wears when it's bigotry against disability. Bigotry with a pat on the head.”
― Mary Johnson, Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve & The Case Against Disability Rights

“The Department of Justice was charged with enforcing the 1980 Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, but did little. Poor enforcement had led to Congressional investigations in 1983 and 1985; in a 1984 issue of the Nebraska Law Review, Robert Dinerstein wrote that "as a result of …its utter failure to enforce CRIPA, The Department of Justice has manifestly failed to extend to institutionalized disabled persons the rights that are properly theirs." John Kip Cornwell, writing in the November 1987 Yale Law Review, leveled similar charges, as did the University of Minnesota's Mary Hayden in 1998, over a decade later. She said the DOJ relied too much on conciliation, showing "solicitousness for the prerogatives of state officials or parents who support institutionalization" rather than for the people who were being kept in the institutions.”
― Mary Johnson, Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve & The Case Against Disability Rights