What Is Your Regional Dialect of American English?

Razib Khan at Gene Expression linked to a very interesting --- but lengthy --- quiz designed by a statistician at North Carolina State University. It's meant to show you which regions of the USA your speech most closely matches.

It asks you all sorts of things, about everything from vowel pronunciation to word usage to idiomatic expressions to which syllables in a given word you stress, and when you're done, you get a lovely map with big blobs of color showing the areas of greatest --- and least --- similarity to your own speech.

Here is mine:

My dialect map! I am clearly an Upper Midwesterner, but the rest of the Midwest and Mountain West aren't too far off. The South and New England, though? Might as well be another country. 

It also gives you two lists of five cities that it thinks are closest to and furthest away from you in their local dialects. 

My best match is Grand Rapids, Michigan, followed by a four-way tie between Lansing, Michigan; Rockford, Illinois; Flint, Michigan*; and Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (The lattermost city is actually one I've spent a lot of time in. I've been to Michigan --- went to science camp on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in high school --- but haven't lived there).

My worst matches are mostly in the Deep South: Huntsville, Alabama; New Orleans, Louisiana; Metairie, Lousiana**; and Birmingham, Alabama. The one exception is Plymouth, Massachusetts.

That map is particularly visually striking in its division of the country so neatly in half --- it looks like someone drew a line diagonally from the Michigan/Ohio border on the western shore of Lake Erie to the southwest corner of New Mexico, and dyed the top half red and the bottom half blue. There's a bit of an intermediate belt, especially toward the West Coast, but all across the central part of the map the red and the blue are right up next to each other. 

They give you a numerical value for each city on either list; that number refers to the probability of any random person in that city giving the same answer to any random question on the quiz that you gave. The map makes the differences seem starker than they are --- the spread between my highest- and lowest-scoring cities was only about eight points. This makes sense when you consider how young a country the US is, and how relatively uniform American English is compared with, say, British English*** or other European languages like Dutch, German, French, Italian, Spanish and probably zillions of others, which have dialects so different from one another (and from the standard language, which American English doesn't really have --- probably because we don't need one yet) that a speaker of, say, standard German would be unable to understand a German-speaking person who speaks Low German or any of the High Franconian or Upper German dialects.

At the end of the quiz, the ask you where you live now and where you spent most of your childhood; they also ask if you are a native English speaker, so maybe if you're not they will ask you about your native language. The data it draws on are restricted to continental American English (i.e., the US minus Alaska and Hawaii), so I don't know how enlightening it will be to someone who speaks any other form of English. I could see it being of interest to non-native English speakers who learned American English; maybe it could tell you something about where the person who taught you English was from!

*So, if people reading this blog ever try to imagine my voice, you could probably do worse than imagining my words read by Michael Moore. Except for the part where Michael Moore is a guy, but whatever.

**I didn't know there was a Metairie, Lousiana. It has a beautiful name, even if it is apparently one of the five places in the nation where I am most likely to have serious trouble making myself understood.

***I would expect Canadian and Australian English also to have regional dialects that are still pretty similar to each other overall, what with their having a similar history of being a British colony at around the same time. I don't know this, though, so it would be nice to have confirmation --- or contradiction, for that matter --- from any Canadian or Australian readers I might have.

All Developmental Disability Is Autism?

Amanda Forest Vivian pointed out something interesting in this post (about a singer using the words "autistic" and "retarded" pejoratively, and then apologizing for it): People seem to be confusing autism, one particular developmental disability, with developmental disability in general.

Here is what she says:

There was a time when all developmental disability was assumed to be intellectual disability and people were confused by the word autism. Now the opposite seems to have happened--for example, when people find out I work with someone who is nonspeaking, they immediately assume she has autism, instead of realizing that there are many disabilities that could cause someone to be nonspeaking. In general, people will often describe anyone with a developmental disability as being "autistic"--even though intellectual disability is the most common developmental disability!

I thought of two reasons why this might be happening, one simple and one not so simple. The simple explanation is all the Autism Awareness campaigns --- people are hyper-aware of autism (aware that it exists, anyway; maybe not always of what it is), and have forgotten that other developmental disabilities exist. (Or maybe it's not so much that they've forgotten, but that the concept "autism" is always lurking near the forefront of their minds, ready to be applied to any person whom they might previously have categorized as retarded, crazy, spastic, etc.)

Also, with how much talk there is of an Autism Epidemic, people might be expecting to see autistic people a lot more frequently than they used to. In some ways, this is good --- people know that we exist, and that we live right alongside them and do many of the same things that they do --- and in some ways it hasn't gone far enough --- people don't seem anywhere near as aware of the existence of autistic adults as they are of autistic children --- but maybe it has also made it so that people expect to see more autistic people than there are, and maybe they're filling up the gap between how many autistic people they expect to see and how many autistic people they do see by lumping other developmentally disabled people into that category. 

It's annoying because autism is not the same as other developmental disabilities, and autism awareness at the expense of other disabilities might make it harder for people with other disabilities to get people to understand them, or make the accommodations they need as opposed to the accommodations autistic people are understood to need.

The second, harder-to-explain thing that occurred to me was that maybe the substitution of autism for developmental disability in general might reflect a value judgment*.

Non-disabled people are afraid of disability. They're afraid of disability because they know it could happen to them (or to their kid, if it's a developmental disability), and because this is an ableist culture that tells people that a life with disability is akin to death**. (Though, mercifully, I think there might be starting to be a little pushback on that point making it into mainstream consciousness --- disability activists have always said that our lives are worth living, but now a few scholars and journalists, here and there, seem to be listening.)

I think Western culture also fetishizes intelligence***, and sees it as one of the few things that can make up for the monstrous faux pas of having a disability in the first place.

You can see a marked difference in how allistic people talk about the autistic people they see as "low-functioning" --- i.e., having intellectual disability**** --- versus those they see as "high-functioning." The former they talk about as if they were not people at all, and in frankly eugenic terms about how much better off everyone would be if they didn't exist; they talk about how expensive such people are, and what a terrible burden they are on their families, the state, or both. If they mention quality of life at all, it's only to say something like, "Nobody could want a life like that..."

Attitudes toward the latter group are somewhat more complicated. Especially with the stereotypical "Aspie," whose impairments are minimal and only affect social interactions and are offset by exceptional intelligence and aptitude for math, science, or computers. They are also thought to be (at least, in their pop-culture incarnation) hyper-rational, like Vulcans, their thought processes uncluttered by emotion and petty interpersonal concerns. (This is an ambivalent form of idealization --- I usually write about it as a negative stereotype, since it also implies that we have no feelings and are amoral, and also that we are something not quite human. I have come to mistrust, intensely, any stereotype that carries that implication, even if it is ostensibly a flattering one, because "you're not human" too easily segues into "you don't have the same rights and protections a human would have." And yet I think there is an element of idealization in it, too.)

So there are competing ideas about these stereotypical autistic geniuses; on the one hand, people tend to mythologize them (or, sometimes, the people who come closest to fitting this stereotype tend to mythologize themselves) as the Prometheuses behind every great technological innovation in human history (c.f. Temple Grandin, "It was probably an Aspie who chipped away at rocks while the other people socialized around the campfire. Without autism traits we might still be living in caves.")

On the other hand, there is definitely a sizeable contingent that would like that category of autistic person to vanish from the Earth as well. I mentioned in an earlier post the growing stereotype of the Aspie psycho-killer (qu'est que c'est), a person whose complete lack of empathy enables them calmly to plan and carry out mass shootings. 

Anyway, my point was that intelligence mitigates the ableist impulse to dehumanize autistic people. Even in autistic people themselves --- how often do you hear, "I'm not disabled; I'm smart!" or some variant thereof? --- you see this come out as a self-defense tactic. I know I used it that way. For me, the problem was that my worldview was too individualistic to see that my individual merits didn't matter; that all people, no matter how smart or stupid, how virtuous or venal, deserve equal rights. I was trying to say, "I'm a person; I deserve to be treated like a person," but because of my internalized ableism it came out as, "But I'm not disabled! You should be treating me like a real person, not a disabled person!"

I think it's entirely possible that this set of biases --- disability is bad, intelligence is good, some autistic people possess intelligence --- might play a small role in explaining why a person who sees a developmentally disabled person jumps to the conclusion that the person is autistic. 

I've also noticed a strain of wishful thinking that says autism isn't really a lifelong condition --- it can be treated, or cured, by (in descending order of battiness) growing up, intensive behavioral training, changing one's diet, taking vitamins and supplements by the fistful, chelation, etc. That might enter into it, too. 

*Obviously I don't think any of this is happening at a conscious level, or with any ill intent. I think that if this is a real thing, and not just something I made up, it's operating at the level of an implicit bias, that you don't even know you have but that can subtly alter what you see to fit what you expect to see.

**Amanda Baggs has written some powerful, if horrifying, things about her own and her mother's experiences with doctors who believe this. 

***I know this is a very controversial statement, given that I am writing this in an American context, and anti-intellectualism is also a thing in American culture! I may write a post about that, too --- how those two contradictory attitudes coexist.

****I'm not sure that that's ALL "low-functioning" and "high-functioning" mean, but the presence or absence of intellectual disability, indicated by one's IQ score, is used often enough in the literature that I feel confident using it myself. And when I use these phrases, I use them to represent what allistic people think autistic people are like, not what I think accurately describes autistic people. Because I think that, while autistic people do vary in how impaired they are and how much support they need, I don't think degrees of impairment map neatly onto a binary of IQ less than 70 or IQ greater than 70. I also think that the same person can be "high functioning" --- need minimal support --- or "low functioning" --- need intensive supports --- in different contexts. Even Temple Grandin, the high-functioning autistic's high-functioning autistic, was what most people would call "low functioning" as a child.

The Delusion Illusion

There's a very interesting discussion in the comment thread on this post at Respectful Insolence; it's about something that's definitely been on my mind a lot as a skeptic, which is the problem of Why People Believe Weird Things.

Here's how it starts:

... [T]he people who claim that the vaccine is useless, and that polio eradication is the result of sanitation, must be mentally challenged at some level. There are not many of them I don't think --- their numbers obviously are a lot less than the incidence of schizophrenics, for example, and I have to wonder about the ability of those folks to organize rational thinking.

What this commenter is doing is trying to grapple with how a person could believe something that is obviously false. (In this instance, it's not just obviously false but also dangerous, in that the belief that vaccines don't work leads people to decide not to vaccinate themselves or their children, which undermines herd immunity and puts other people at risk of disease).

The conclusion he comes to --- that it must be mental illness that makes them cling to their counterfactual beliefs, despite any and all contradictory evidence you might throw at them --- is one I've seen a lot of people use to try and explain other people's mind-bogglingly irrational beliefs or bizarre or evil actions. I see it most often in this latter context, where someone commits a horrible crime, like mass murder, and in the news coverage the label "disturbed" or "troubled" or "mentally ill" or "unstable" gets attached to the perpetrator. (Even if he had never been to a psychiatrist in his life.)

It's easy to understand why a non-mentally-ill person would think that --- you see someone do something that you would never do, that you cannot even fathom doing, and you want to know what could possibly drive someone to do it. If imagining yourself in their shoes doesn't give you an answer, you're left with the possibility that this person must differ from you in some fundamental way.

You don't usually have enough information about the person to guess at how they differ from you, why they make a choice that you would not make under the same circumstances. (Just so you know, the choice I'm thinking of is the choice to become an anti-vaccine activist, not the choice to commit mass murder. Insert joke about the indistinguishability of those two things here.)

Anyway, for people with no experience of mental illness themselves, "mental illness" seems to function as a kind of conceptual black box that can be invoked to explain anything anyone does that otherwise defies explanation.

It also works to preclude introspection, to cordon off the person being labeled as mentally ill as not needing any more explanation. If someone is violent, their violence is a symptom of "mental illness," not a universal human tendency aggravated by social conditions. You don't have to ask any questions about, say, which human lives society values over others, or about whether there might not be conflicting cultural messages about violence (i.e., violence is bad but you're not a man unless you are capable of violence), or anything like that. No one need be examined or judged except the person who acted out.

Similarly, if someone is being illogical, or ignoring evidence, or deceiving hirself about something, you need not ask whether you might not be deceiving yourself about something else. The person making the illogical argument is not demonstrating the limitations and biases of human thought, to which all people are susceptible --- no, they're just crazy.

It's an easy explanation, but it's wrong and it makes life a lot harder for people who do have mental illnesses.

Here's another comment that explains how that works:

People who argue against vaccination are dangerous extremists. They are irresponsible and willfully ignorant. Their lies and manipulation are not a political issue for me, they're an intensely personal slight on who I am, and a threat to my very life.

It's clear that you can't grasp why your ableist language is problematic in this context, so I'll break it down for you.

1. Virtually the entire foundation of the anti-vax movement is the lie that vaccination causes autism and other developmental disabilities.

2. These people refer to non-neurotypical and developmentally and physically disabled people as "vaccine damaged", "broken", "stolen", "lost", and "soulless", among others.

3. Their argument is that death by vaccine preventable disease is better than life with a disability.

4. When presented with the fact that many disabled and chronically ill people are at greater risk of dying of VPDs they often claim that it's simply Darwinism in action, that the virus is cleaning up the gene pool.

5. It is not uncommon for these people to abuse, and even kill, their own disabled or non-NT children. When they do so they are often lionised by their peers, told what good parents they are, and let off by the just system because having to live with their (now dead charge) meant they'd "suffered enough."

Ergo, when you breeze in and spew back the same rhetoric as them, equating their deliberate cruelty and ignorance with developmental disability, then you're as bad as they are. You're saying "These people are bad, they're doing the wrong thing, they must be mentally disabled."

I can bring a fairly recent comparison to mind, that of the media reaction to pretty much every instance of an American gunman mowing a group of innocent people down. Do they say "He must be angry" or "He's a truly awful man"? No. They claim he must be autistic, or schizophrenic. Just like you they conflate wrongdoing with disability or mental illness, because Cthulhu knows there isn't already enough stigma around either topic, or enough fear or disgust at those of us on the receiving end.

Clear now? If the anti-vax monkeys shit in their hands and fling it, you're not going to make them stop by curling one out into your own palm, and lobbing it into their cage.

This same commenter also makes another important point, that being delusional is not at all like being a crank with a megaphone (or a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives):

The kind of fixed, delusional beliefs that go along with schizophrenic mental illness are typically just as distressing to the person with the diagnosis, if not more so. Watching someone in the grip of a florid delusion is very different to watching the majority of the anti-vax crowd's stubborn refusal to heed facts. I've seen people with various MIs, eating disorders in particular, who know that all food isn't poison, but can't make that inner dialogue relinquish the claims it makes. With my OCD I am excruciatingly aware that doing Y won't stop Z from happening, but knowing that truth, and feeling that it's safe to act on it feel like they're a million miles apart. 

So obviously, anyone who is genuinely suffering compulsions or delusions requires help and support, and an understanding that it's not deliberate. The anti-vax crowd requires a cluebat to the brain, perhaps in the form of a trip to somewhere that VPDs roam unchecked.

I've never been delusional, exactly, but I have had severe depression, and what this person says about knowing that what you're thinking is wrong but still being powerless to stop the thoughts rings very, very true.

I can't imagine a person stuck in that kind of epistemological nightmare state would be very likely to get up on a soapbox to try and convince other people to adopt the same delusions.

No, that sounds more like the behavior of someone who has never had cause to question their own grip on reality.

Anyway, I'm going to bastardize Occam's Razor and say that you don't need invoke a relatively uncommon phenomenon* to explain something that could just as easily be accounted for by something more commonplace.

Normal, baseline human thought is prone to a whole bunch of biases, errors, shortcuts and unconscious distortions that make each person a sort of Unreliable Narrator** of their own life.

Here are a few that I could see making someone think vaccines cause autism:

1. People prefer stories to lists of things that happened. (Thus, if one thing happens after another thing, you might see a connection between the two, even if there is none. Also, one person telling a very personal, emotional story is going to move you more, and stick in your mind longer, than someone throwing a bunch of statistics at you.)

2. People tend to idealize the past. If you didn't notice that your child was different right away, but only once they started to miss developmental milestones, you might start remembering them as more ideally "normal" than they really were as infants.

3. People like to think they are more or less in control of what happens in their lives. So thinking that their child is autistic because they chose to vaccinate hir might, weirdly, be less scary than thinking their child just is autistic and there was no way they could've prevented it***.

4. People's experiences color their view of the world. Along with #1 and #2, this one could make a person who had seen their "normal" baby suddenly develop autism in toddlerhood blame vaccines, and also greatly overestimate how drastically the prevalence of autism has risen. (At the same time, this explains why so many people feel like they can just opt out of vaccination; unless they're a lot older than most new parents are, they don't know what a lot of the vaccine-preventable diseases were like.)

5. People also tend to believe what the people around them believe. If your friends tend to mistrust doctors and medicine, and prefer "alternative" medicine, you might find it easier to believe that modern medicine's great accomplishments, including mass vaccination, aren't really that great and doctors just took credit for something that was already happening (e.g., the first comment I quoted, where the commenter mentioned having heard people say that improvements in sanitation, not Jonas Salk's vaccine, were responsible for eradicating polio in the U.S.), or even that modern medicine is making us sicker than we were in the idyllic past. (See also #2).

Finally, I don't have data on this (will look for some, but that's another post), but I strongly suspect that believing something made your child autistic correlates with seeing autism as The Worst Thing Ever.

*Mental illness is actually not super-uncommon, but it is still definitely a minority experience

**Everyone else is even less reliable at describing your life, though. So you still win.

***This probably won't matter to people who've managed to accept their child's autism; they tend to care less about why their child is autistic and more about how to help them live a full, independent life.

Senator Envy

I am often envious of people living in other states, or even other parts of my state, for their awesome state senators and representatives.

As I live in the Kansas City Metro Area, I read a lot about Missouri Sen. Jolie Justus, who represents a district including parts of Kansas City, MO. She's an out lesbian, and the first openly gay member of the Missouri Senate. She also generally seems to look out for her poorest constituents; whenever I see her quoted in the Kansas City Star she seems to be talking about how such-and-such measure would affect the poor, the disabled, the homeless etc. She seems to want to make Missouri a kinder, gentler, more inclusive place.

I have also had reason to wish that I lived in a different part of Kansas, so that Kansas Sen. Marci Francisco would be my senator instead of Sen. Greg Smith. I wrote to both of them (and the rest of the members of the Natural Resources subcommittee of the Kansas Senate Ways and Means Committee) concerning an effort to reintroduce black-footed ferrets on private property in western Kansas, and a resolution their committee was considering that would oppose this effort. Sen. Francisco wrote back to me, and gave the impression that she was well-informed on the issue, and that she shared my concern that the resolution being discussed was written in a hugely misleading way. She also told me about several efforts she had made to change the language of the resolution by amending it, and that she would keep trying to edit out the parts that she thought were wrong. (Sort of hedging one's bets, is how I took it: the ideal outcome would've been for the resolution to fail, but if it looked like it might pass, it would be less hostile to the reintroduction effort than it would've been without her intervention. I can appreciate that.)

Now I have another state senator to covet and admire from afar: Texas Sen. Wendy Davis. She's filibustering a particularly draconian set of restrictions on abortion that would close the vast majority of Texas's abortion clinics. Should the bill become law, only five clinics (out of 47) could stay open, and those five are all clustered in the eastern part of Texas.

Map:

Map showing all clinics in Texas that offer abortion (top), and all of those clinics that meet the requirements laid out in SB5. Graphic made by Whole Woman's Health

Anyway, Sen. Davis is taking heroic measures to block this bill! She's been standing on the Senate floor and speaking since 11:18 this morning, and she's going to keep speaking until midnight tonight. She has had to stay in that spot for the whole ten hours she's been speaking, and will have to stay there for the two hours and forty-five minutes she still has to go. She can't stop talking, leave (even to use the bathroom), eat or drink. Republican senators have even called foul on her for wearing a back brace at one point in her filibuster. At least she's wearing good shoes!

I am in awe of how hardcore she is. I'm a lot younger than she is, and in good physical shape, but I don't think I could do what she's doing, even on a pure physical level. (Seriously. I can work outside for six, seven or eight hours in the hot sun, like when I dug an 80-foot-long, maybe 18" deep on average trench in my mom's backyard to put in a brick wall border for a giant flowerbed we're still filling up. Did that all by myself, during peak sun hours in a Kansas summer. It was probably high 80s or low 90s*. Yet I am probably 85%-90% certain I would collapse before the end of the twelve-hour, forty-two-minute filibuster she's powering through.) Obviously I wouldn't have the quick wits to come up with original, relevant content to fill a twelve-hour filibuster; apparently in real life you can't just grab the nearest book and start reading aloud.

*For any international readers I might have, those numbers are on the Fahrenheit scale. In degrees Celsius, it was probably 30-35. Hot by my standards, anyway. Some of you might scoff at that, but I am a transplant from further north, and I miss winter. 

Ha Ha

I just found not one, but two identical paragraph-length comments urging the reader to "BOYCOTT AMERICAN WOMEN!"

I will not publish them, or quote them, but I just wanted to share that piece of information.

(I might express hope that the commenter gets what he wishes for --- a foreign-born wife, particularly one from, oh, maybe Russia or China --- just so he can have his expectations of a demure and submissive little woman utterly confounded. But I would not want any woman to actually wind up married to this loser, so I will instead wish that he spend his life alone with his sense of entitlement.)

More About Stigma

Miri at Brute Reason has a very thought-provoking post up about social stigma, and whether anyone deserves to be stigmatized.

She doesn't think so, and she gives lots of very good reasons, including these:

When a group is stigmatized, they are considered less than human in some ways. Whichever aspect of them is stigmatized becomes the whole of their identity in our eyes,  and often this means that even if they change the actions that caused them to fall into that category in the first place, the stigma remains. ...
...
[W]ielding psychological manipulation as punishment really, really rubs me the wrong way. The attitude that if someone does something bad they deserve to be cast out and hated and seen as inhuman scares me. I think it's very normal and understandable to want to punish someone for doing a horrible thing, but, as I wrote after the Steubenville verdict, I'm not sure that's the most useful and skeptical response. I feel that our primary concern should be preventing people from doing bad things (both first-time and repeat offenses) and not satisfying our own need for revenge by punishing them.

But, as good as these arguments are (and I am still turning them over in my head, and will probably keep this idea, that stigma and ostracism are inhumane and that there is nothing anyone can do that is bad enough to make them deserving of such treatment, for a very long time*), I'm not sure I can follow them all the way.

Between the ongoing story I've been following in my local newspaper about a girl in my city --- identified only by the initials LP --- who was found locked in a closet in her mother's apartment and my discovery of the Homeschoolers Anonymous blog, and also Libby Anne at Love, Joy, Feminism blogging somewhat regularly about the disturbingly popular child-rearing philosophy of Michael and Debi Pearl, my mind has been more preoccupied than usual with the vilest, most extreme forms of child abuse.

I commented on Miri's blog that, if anyone does deserve to have a stigma permanently attached to them, it's the perpetrators of those horrors, particularly the Pearls (who were not content merely to abuse their own children, if indeed they followed their own method, but who wrote books proclaiming their combination of hard-core obedience training, enforced by frequent beatings, and withholding food from "defiant" children is the only thing that will guarantee a child will grow up to be a Godly person who is saved from Hell) and the mother in this ten-part personal narrative on Homeschoolers Anonymous.

Doing that to a child, for as long as the anonymous author's mother did --- from the spread in ages of the various children in the family, and the author's Conclusion where she mentions that her two youngest brothers are still with her parents and the abuse is ongoing, it had to have been more than a decade --- is a world away from, say, committing an armed robbery. This wasn't a single act, this was a long-term campaign this woman waged against her children. She stayed at home, ostensibly "homeschooling" her children throughout this period, so it's hard to see a line between these acts and the rest of her life. 

Yet, with the LP story, which is just as horrific, and which makes me feel just as much rage on the victim's behalf, I can see more of Miri's point. LP's mother was very young when she had LP, and at several points in the story you can see hints of someone who was overwhelmed, and who might never have done what she did to her daughter if she had gotten the help she needed but probably never asked for. It's hard to see whom it would help to stigmatize her, when she was already probably stigmatized for other reasons (poverty, blackness, living in a subsidized apartment, being an unmarried mother of three children by two different fathers), which might well have contributed to her feeling that the only thing she could do with her eldest daughter was to keep her out of sight.

But the Pearls, and the parents in the anonymous woman's story? They're not stigmatized at all, except by people like me, who have no power in their lives or social contact with them, or people who have left the conservative evangelical Christian circles those people move in. Within that community, they are revered as leaders and role models. I'm sure that this knowledge is part of the reason I want so badly to rain down opprobrium upon them: because, unlike Jacole Prince, they're getting off scot-free, and they continue to believe that what they are doing is right.

And Miri does grapple with the problem of great evil in her post, too --- where I chose to focus on child abuse, she wrote about rape. And she made another great point in doing so:

Being a convicted rapist is actually a very stigmatized identity -- it's just that rapists rarely become convicted rapists. Rape is known to be a Very Bad Thing, but rapists know that they can get away with it if they commit it in certain ways. Despite the stigma, rape is pervasive and rape culture exists.

I absolutely see a dynamic like this playing out in mainstream society's attitudes about child abuse; child abuse is so heinous, so evil, so stigmatized that we can't ever believe anyone we know is abusing their child. So we second-guess ourselves when we start to wonder about a child's suspicious bruises, unexplained absences, dirty clothes, poor hygiene etc. The stigma attached to child abuse is terrible, so we are reluctant to call it down on our neighbors' heads, even if we suspect they are abusing their children. What if we're wrong? We'll have ruined an innocent person's life! 

(This will sound painfully familiar to anyone who has been raped, or who has spent any time reading about rape culture.)

Another thing worth pondering about this problem as it pertains to child abuse is that, when the child who is being abused, neglected, or even murdered has a disability, the abusive, neglectful or murderous parent is not stigmatized so much as they are pitied. The poor dear, she was carrying an impossible burden. 

A mother can appear in a film in which she tells the camera she has thought about putting her autistic daughter in the car and driving off a bridge with her, and the main reaction to this film will be sympathy, not shock or horror. 

I point this out not to argue that parents of disabled children don't deserve sympathy, or much better support than they're currently getting from society at large, but to argue that this reaction leaves no room for the child. They're a person too, and they have the right to food, shelter, medical care, education, love, and as much freedom and autonomy as is developmentally appropriate**. Focusing on how hard it is to care for a disabled child, even if you're only trying to explain the parent's actions, works to excuse the parent and put some of the blame for their fate onto the child. It also works to make life harder for all disabled people, because it makes it sound like we're being unreasonable just by existing, and that attitude is exactly the kind of attitude that resists making accommodations for us, even when those accommodations are not particularly expensive, awkward or difficult.

Particularly when we're talking about children whose disabilities are behavioral, this idea that it's just too hard works to excuse awful things like restraint and seclusion, at home and in school. At its extreme, it can lead to parents keeping their disabled children in dog cages; they see no other way to treat them because it's too hard and it's not like the children are normal children, for whom such treatment would be abusive, no, they're abnormal children for whom it is necessary.

So even while I see that a heavy stigma attached to child abuse can be counterproductive, in that it might discourage people from reporting their suspicions, I also think there are some kinds of abuse that are not heavily stigmatized, that are even excused (i.e., abuse of children with disabilities, which is often framed as a tragic consequence of disability) or met with approval (i.e., abuse within insular communities that don't share the wider culture's norms).

And it makes me furious that there isn't a heavy stigma, that people like, say, Michael and Debi Pearl don't even think they've done anything wrong, and sleep the untroubled sleep of the just.

*"Keeping an idea" is what I do when I read or hear something that blows my mind, but that I do not immediately know whether to accept it as truth. I kept a lot of ideas related to feminism in the (long) time before I decided I was a feminist, and I kept an idea of Richard Dawkins's that I now think I do believe is true, that raising a child to believe in Hell (at least, a Hell that they could go to --- I'm not sure it's true if Hell is only for big evildoers like Hitler and Stalin) is an abusive practice. I'm also keeping the idea that veganism is a moral imperative for those who are able to adopt it. A lot of the ideas that I keep are of the form "actually, this thing that we do all the time is bad, and you should stop doing it/get other people to stop doing it.")

**This notion --- that freedom and autonomy can't be absolute when you're talking about children --- is actually more complicated than it sounds, especially when we're talking about children with disabilities, or dependent adults with disabilities. How can you define what is "developmentally appropriate" for a child whose development has been atypical? Especially if said child is ahead of his age in some ways while also being delayed in others? (This was me, and I suspect it is most autistic people!) I know only this much: the way these decisions are currently made gives too little freedom to developmentally disabled adults.

In Which a Newspaper Article Makes Me Angry

I know, it happens all the time, to everyone. 

I'm still going to write about it, though.

The article that bothered me was this one in today's Kansas City Star, about the controversial anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon joining the University of Missouri's anthropology department as Distinguished Research Professor and Chancellor's Chair for Excellence in Anthropology.

Napoleon Chagnon, if you didn't know, is famous (or infamous) for his research on a group of Amazonian indigenous people called Yanomami. He called them "the fierce people" (which he says is a translation of what they call themselves) and said that their way of life was especially violent, characterized by constant warfare and abduction of women from other villages. 

A Yanomami shaman and spokesman, Davi Kopenawa, says that Chagnon's depictions of his people are false, and that he has harmed the Yanomami by making everyone think of them this way [PDF]:

For us, we Yanomami who live in the forest, the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon is not our friend. He does not say good things, he doesn't transmit good words. He talks about the Yanomami but his words are only hostile. He is angry and says, 'The Yanomami are bad, the Yanomami fire arrows at one another because of women. The Yanomami beat one another.' He has always thought that. 

Young American men and women think, 'Napoleon knows a lot and transmits true words --- the Yanomami are very bad.' I am not happy about this.

But that wasn't the thing that bothered me about this article; the article actually does address the arguments that Chagnon's research was shoddy, that he mischaracterized the Yanomami, making them out to be far more vicious than they are, and that his activities in the Yanomami villages may have harmed the people he set out to study*.

No, what bothered me was the reductive way they framed the story, as another battle in the ongoing war between partisans of Nature and Nurture.

You often see that in articles about evolutionary psychology, especially when the person or idea being discussed is the subject of controversy.

Here are a couple of examples from the article:

Chagnon ... has been a lightning rod at the center of an academic tempest over evolutionary anthropology. In Darwin's world (and Chagnon's), where the fastest, fiercest, smartest, and perhaps cruelest, survive to pass on their genes, what does that mean to human nature today? 

Those arguing against this sociobiology fiercely contend our behavior and culture are rooted in our environment --- or, at least, one cannot credibly discern the effects of a "mean gene" from a war-ax-wielding ancestor in the family tree. 

... 

[Quoting MU Anthropology Department Chairman R. Lee Lyman] "... The Darwinian perspective might give us unique insight. Chagnon was one of the founders of that approach. Unfortunately, it became a political issue as opposed to a scholastic issue. It was heresy."

(That's a rhetorical trick that particularly annoys me: if someone has a problem with your research or your ideas, don't engage the substance of their critique, just dismiss it as politics. You see this in discussions of gender differences, too. A feminist points out that gender might be more complicated, and more malleable, than the hard-wired "pink brain, blue brain" model popular today, and people roll their eyes at her for letting her politics get in the way of Serious Science**. That maneuver also makes the person whose ideas are being discussed into a heroic figure who is being unfairly silenced, rather than an ordinary researcher whose methods, data, and interpretations of said data are being criticized by other researchers.)

More:

The article [that Chagnon published in Science in 1988 (PDF)], summed up as "killers have more kids" by some, rattled or outraged many in his discipline. Suggesting that brutality might be embroidered into our genes by evolution seemed a slippery slope toward racism or a step backward toward eugenics that saw the forced sterilization of thousands. 

"This is no longer thought to be true. There are, of course, a few holdouts," explained Bill Irons, Northwestern University professor emeritus and a Chagnon ally. "Many anthropologists and many on the political left as well preferred to believe that human behavior was shaped completely by culture."

The article makes it sound like there are only two choices for what to believe about human nature and evolution: that human nature is innate, heritable, unchanging and inherently violent, selfish and sexist, or that there is no such thing as human nature, and that people will be whatever the culture around them shapes them to be.

This leaves out a growing body of research within anthropology, primatology, evolutionary  biology and related fields that deals with other factors besides male-on-male conflict that have shaped human evolution.

Examples of people doing this kind of research include: 

1) Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who has studied mating behavior, female reproductive strategies and social organization in langur monkeys, and has developed a theory that kinship networks and shared child-rearing ("alloparenting" or "allomothering," she calls it) were necessary for early humans' survival.

Here is a snippet from an interview she did with Scientific American blogger Eric Michael Johnson, in which she briefly addresses the notion that killers and rapists have more kids, and why she thinks that's not true:

[A]mong hunter-gatherers, the way to breed successfully is to have alloparental help and provisioning help from others. Anybody who goes around killing off his wife's relatives and stealing women is going to have a lower chance of rearing offspring. These warring bands of brothers didn't emerge until fairly recently, after people started to become more sedentary. 

Part two of that interview is here.

2) Frans de  Waal, who studies cooperation, communication, empathy, conflict resolution, reciprocal altruism (i.e., trading favors) and sharing in chimpanzees, bonobos and capuchin monkeys.

3) Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist whose research has mostly dealt with the physiological effects of stress, but who has also studied social hierarchies and aggression in two troops of savanna baboons in Kenya, where he saw the level of violence in one of those troops drop off dramatically when the biggest, meanest dominant males were all killed in an outbreak of tuberculosis. The troop has kept up this more peaceful way of life even now, over 20 years since the dominant-male die-off, when probably every single (current) member of the troop was born after it happened, and every adult male has come from another troop. 

4) Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist who has studied reciprocal altruism, sexual selection, and parental investment in offspring. He wrote an article in 1971 called The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism (PDF), in which he argued that animals who repay other animals' helpful acts were more likely to keep getting help throughout their lives, and thus were more likely to survive longer, have more offspring survive to adulthood, etc.

That's not an exhaustive list, just the names that I, a non-anthropologist who has never taken an anthropology class, know.

*The name they gave him, Shaki, which the article's author translates as "annoying bee," does not suggest that they thought very highly of him, or found him very pleasant company.

**See Simon Baron-Cohen's review of Cordelia Fine's book Delusions of Gender, in which he uses words and phrases like "polemic," "barely veiled agenda," "blurring science and politics," and "extreme social determinism" to describe Fine and her book, when she's really more like a gender agnostic than a proselytizer.

Autistic People Are Human

So I'm a day late but I still want to participate in this campaign to change the Google search results for "autistic people are."

Here is what they are now:

If you can't see the image, it's a screengrab of a Google search box with the phrase "autistic people are" and a list of four choices to complete the phrase. The four words are, in order, "annoying," "smart," "evil," and "retarded." 

Annoying. Evil. Retarded.

Evil? Evil?!

I'll tell you, that one still surprises me. I've seen it before --- seen "autistic" used as shorthand for some moral failing, usually selfishness or a lack of empathy --- but it still astonishes me to see that people apparently see us that way. I'm used to the "empty fortress" stereotypes, where people think we have no inner lives, no thoughts, no feelings, that our words and acts are just random spewage that we cannot possibly have intended, that cannot possibly be directed at any goal, anything we want. We can't want, remember?

That's the stereotype I grew up with. It's a depressing one, and still very much alive. You can see it underlying mainstream America's indifference to the abuse, neglect, and even murder of autistic children by their parents (or other caregivers). "Kids like that are hard to take care of," people will say, "it's no wonder she snapped," or "it's no wonder they weren't up to the job," or "What else were they supposed to do?" And the kids themselves, their deaths don't seem as tragic as the death of a normal child would be. Their lives were cut short, but what kind of a life would it have been, really? These people never grow up, they just get older. Forty years old, sitting in your parents' living room? That's no kind of a life at all. Isn't it almost for the best, to have spared them that?

(No, it's not for the best. In case you were wondering.)

But apparently there's a new stereotype coexisting with this one, that of the stone-cold killer. It cropped up in the coverage of the mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, and also of the one in Aurora, Colorado. People were asking, like they always do, who had done this, and how could they have done it? And one of the answers was, "It was a disturbed young man who may have been on the autism spectrum."

I don't know exactly when that autism stereotype started to take root in the public mind; it seems to have come up as people have started to be more aware that some autistic people can speak, go to school, attend mainstream classes, and do very well academically. When I was a child, this was not generally known, and people often expressed surprise that a child as articulate and precocious as I was could have autism.

Like Landon Bryce, I blame Simon Baron-Cohen's increasingly popular conception of autism for this development. I know that Professor Baron-Cohen does not think autistic people are evil, or even that we don't have feelings for other people, but the terminology he chose to use --- calling us poor "empathizers" --- conjures exactly that image in a reader's mind. 

All head and no heart. 

This, of course, is one of the reasons why I'm not mollified by seeing "smart" on the list as well: because I know that the Autistic Genius trope can blend seamlessly into the stone-cold killer. Both are unhindered by emotion or personal attachment, both can act with equal ruthlessness. The only difference is in what they do, how they direct their dispassionate efforts.

(The other reason is that smartness is often seen as a consolation prize: oh, you're autistic? You must be GREAT at math! What's that? You're not? Well, what good are you then?!)

So, what would I like people to know that autistic people are? 

Human.

That's all.

Blaming the Patriarchy for Autistic Children

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: There's a brief passage in Betty Friedan's landmark study of American housewives in the 1950s and '60s, The Feminine Mystique, where she discusses autism. She embraces the understanding of autism popular at the time, which posits that autism is an emotional disturbance arising from the relationship between mother and child. Yet she parts company from other popularizers of this theory by arguing that the confining, constricted nature of the housewife role distorts women's personalities and their relationships with their husbands and children, thereby making psychological problems more, not less, likely in the families where the mothers are full-time housewives.

She was, of course, massively wrong about autism, though I think her overall thesis about women's needs, and the failure of traditional gender roles to meet them, was (and is!) sound. The few paragraphs she devotes to autism aren't crucial to the points she makes in the rest of the book, and the psychogenic theory of autism is pretty much dead today, and hardly in need of aggressive debunking, but she talks about increasing prevalence of autism with an urgency similar to the "autism epidemic" fears of today.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Classic Text of the Modern Women's Movement which Exploded the Myth of THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE!

It's the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, and instead of talking about the book as a whole, or evaluating it in a modern context (as so many other people, far better informed than I, have already done), I am going to spotlight one small part in the book, where she talks about autism.

(If you've read the book, even recently, you might not even remember her talking about autism at all! The idea might even strike you as anachronistic, given that freaking out over an Autism Epidemic is so pervasive in our time. But it's in there --- it hit me with particular force because I am autistic, and the passage is the kind of thing it's not at all nice to read if you're reading it about yourself.)

If you haven't read this book, do, especially if you're interested in feminism or women's history. As profoundly limited in scope as it is (a quality it shares with the earlier, similar work by Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which also concerns itself with society's neglect of women's minds and non-reproductive capacities) --- the only women who show up in its pages are well-educated, middle-and-upper-class white women, who don't have to do hard, physical work (or much of any work) to survive, for whom work outside the home could be intellectually demanding and emotionally rewarding, instead of boring, exhausting, dangerous, soul-killing drudgery, and whose labor is only exploited within the home and never also outside it --- it's still valuable for its detailed enumeration of the psychological costs of limiting women's lives to marriage, home and family.

Off and on throughout the book, and in a more sustained fashion in Chapters Eleven and Twelve, Friedan talks about how, perversely, the 1950s and '60s funneling of women back into the full-time housewife role actually hurt family life and sexual relations. In Chapter Twelve, "Progressive Dehumanization," she describes a pattern she sees of women whose too-early entry into marriage and motherhood precluded their developing authentic selves of their own, and thus rendered them incapable of raising children with all the skills and character traits they needed to become independent, themselves.

(I am going to quote at some length from the chapter, so for readability's sake I'm going to do what I did in this post and not blockquote the entire thing, but instead draw lines above and below the quoted text to separate it from my own. Quotations within the quoted passage I will still blockquote).

Here she brings in autism as the logical endpoint of this Great Chain of Nonbeing, this "progressive dehumanization" as one psychologically stunted generation brings up another, even more psychologically stunted, to the point of being autistic.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

At its most extreme, this pattern of progressive dehumanization can be seen in the cases of schizophrenic children: "autistic" or "atypical" children, as they are sometimes called. I visisted a famous clinic which has been studying these children for almost twenty years. During this period, cases of these children, arrested at a very primitive, sub-infantile level, have seemed to some to be on the increase. The authorities differ as to the cause of this strange condition, and whether it is actually on the increase or only seems to be because it is now more often diagnosed. Until quite recently, most of these children were thought to be mentally retarded. But the condition is being seen more frequently now, in hospitals and clinics, by doctors and psychiatrists. And it is not the same as the irreversible, organic types of mental retardation. It can be treated, and sometimes cured.

These children often identify themselves with things, inanimate objects --- cars, radios, etc., or with animals --- pigs, dogs, cats. The crux of the problem seems to be that these children have not organized or developed strong enough selves to cope even with the child's reality; they live on the level of things or of instinctual biological impulse that has not been organized into human framework at all. As for the causes, the authorities felt they "must examine the personality of the mother, who is the medium through which the primitive infant transforms himself into a socialized human being."

At the clinic I visited (The James Jackson Putnam Children's Center in Boston) the workers were cautious about drawing conclusions about these profoundly disturbed children. But one of the doctors said, a bit impatiently, about the increasing stream of "missing egos, fragile egos, poorly developed selves" that he encountered --- "It's just the thing we've always known, that if the parent has a fragile ego, the child will."
Most of the mothers of the children who never developed a core of human self were "extremely immature individuals" themselves, though on the surface they "give the impression of being well-adjusted." They were very dependent on their own mothers, fled this dependency into early marriage, and "have struggled heroically to build and maintain the image they have created of a fine woman, wife and mother."

The need to be a mother, the hope and expectation that through this experience she may become a real person, capable of true emotions, is so desperate that of itself it may create anxiety, ambivalence, fear of failure. Because she is so barren of spontaneous manifestations of maternal feelings, she studies vigilantly all the new methods of upbringing and reads treatises about physical and mental hygiene. [This passage, along with the one a few paragraphs down, comes from Beata Rank (1949), "Adaptation of the Psychoanalytical Technique for the Treatment of Young Children with Atypical Development," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry*, Vol. 19, Issue 1, pp. 130-139]

Her omnipresent care of her child is based not on spontaneity but on following "the picture of what a good mother should be," in the hope that "through identification with the child, her own flesh and blood, she may experience vicariously the joys of real living, of genuine feeling."
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

(Is anyone else starting to think of the evil Other Mother from "Coraline" yet?)
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

And thus, the child is reduced from "passive inertia" to "screaming in the night" to non-humanness. "The passive child is less of a threat because he does not make exaggerated demands on the mother, who feels constantly in danger of revealing that emotionally she has little or nothing to offer, that she is a fraud." When she discovers that she cannot really find her own fulfillment through the child:

... she fights desperately for control, no longer of herself perhaps, but of the child. The struggles over toilet training and weaning are generally battles in which she tries to redeem herself. The child becomes the real victim --- victim of the mother's helplessness which, in turn, creates an aggression in her that mounts to destruction. The only way for the child to survive is to retreat, to withdraw, not only from the dangerous mother, but from the whole world as well.

And so he becomes a "thing," or an animal, or "a restless wanderer in search of no one and no place, weaving about the room, circling the walls as if they were bars he would break through."

In this clinic, the doctors were often able to trace a similar pattern back several generations. The dehumanization was indeed progressive.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The first thing about this passage that jumps out at me is the objectification of the autistic children Friedan and her expert interlocutors are observing. 

It's just so explicit: autistic people are not human, we're not even conscious. We represent the endpoint of a multigenerational loss of humanity. It's kind of ironic and weird that a book whose aim is to prove that women's minds are more complex, capable of more and needing more, than the psych experts of the time thought possible, would make the same kind of categorical dismissal of the possibility of any inner life in another group of people.

Maybe it's not that weird. And the point she's trying to make --- that people who are shunted into parenthood without any opportunity to live their own lives, or find out what they really want (including whether they want to be parents!) tend to make poor parents --- is a valid one; it's just that autistic people are neither "dehumanized" nor the result of poor parenting. We're as fully human as anyone else.

Moving on: You can see Bruno Bettelheim's** "refrigerator mother" theory of autism supplying most of the basic theory here; it's just that Friedan is more sympathetic to the mothers than he is. Both writers (and Friedan was trained as a psychologist, too) think autism is a state of psychological emptiness (no self, no thoughts, no capacity to relate to others) caused by something going wrong in the mother/child relationship --- something the mother does wrong. Bettelheim thought children became autistic because their mothers rejected them --- at some level (whether they were aware of it or not) they "wish(ed) that (their) child(ren) should not exist." For Friedan, the problem starts earlier: the mothers' own emotional development is curtailed, because they never had a chance to do anything other than marry young and have children, so the mothers lean too hard on their young children for emotional support, which then stunts the children's emotional growth to an even greater extent. Mother and child are both victims, and the social order is to blame.

I see no difference at all between Friedan and Bettelheim in their degree of empathy for actual autistic children (and perish the thought that they might consider autistic adults): there is none. The whole point of both of their theories is that we are not people, we have no inner lives worth considering; they only differ on how we came to be that way. We represent the end stage of some pathology, whether it is social (patriarchy, in Friedan) or personal (refrigerator motherhood, in Bettelheim).

*Am I the only person who finds the term "orthopsychiatry" to be very creepy? It has a connotation of straightening, of bringing into line, that I don't think belongs in the mental-health profession. I know (partially from reading The Feminine Mystique itself, although The Organization Man and The Lonely Crowd also helped give me this impression) that that was indeed the aim of psychiatry in those days --- to bring people into line, to help them "adjust" --- but it still creeps me out a lot.

**Bettelheim isn't cited in any of the sections describing autism, probably because The Feminine Mystique predated his most famous work about autism, The Empty Fortress, by four years. But he had been running his Orthogenic School for "disturbed" children since the mid-1940s, and had written at least two things (an essay for Scientific American magazine, and an article about feral children, whom he believed were really autistic) about autism prior to The Feminine Mystique's publication in 1963. Bettelheim is quoted at length elsewhere in the chapter --- Friedan devotes a lot of space to his observations of his fellow prisoners in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. Also, William Long, who has written a series of articles on how various writers have understood autism throughout its history, believes that Bettelheim must have been popularizing his theories of autism long before he published The Empty Fortress, because Bernard Rimland criticizes Bettelheim and his "psychogenic" view of autism in his own book, Early Infantile Autism, published in 1964.

Is Fear of Vaccines a Liberal Thing?

That's what I had always thought --- that the right wing can have their creationists, their global warming deniers, their opposition to stem-cell research, and whatever else, but we on the left have to claim the lion's share of the anti-vaccination crowd.

Photo taken by Flickr user captaincinema

I believed this mostly for two reasons: first, most of the anti-vaccination rhetoric I had heard focused on scary chemicals that may or may not be present in vaccines, and scary-chemical rhetoric is also a staple of diverse left-leaning causes ranging from the legitimate (i.e., environmentalism) to the kooky (alternative medicine, the cult of the "natural"). The second reason is that, to the extent that the anti-vaccine celebrities I'd heard of can be said to have politics, their politics tend to be Democratic. The one obvious example is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a Democrat and prominent environmentalist, and the two other anti-vaccine celebrities I can think of, Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, aren't involved very much in U.S. politics, but the profiles of them I linked to suggest that they're Democratic-leaning.  

Anti-vaccine booth at the 2008 Netroots Nation convention in Austin, TX. Photo credit: Lindsay Beyerstein

The famous science writer Chris Mooney was also under the impression that anti-vaccine-ism is a crank ideology peculiar to the left, though I'm not sure he is anymore.

The mass freakout on the right over Gardasil made me reevaluate that impression, though.

It's true, Gardasil is a special case because it's a vaccine for adolescents --- and, initially, adolescent girls, although it's now recommended for all young people --- meant to protect against the cancer-causing strains of human papillomavirus, which spreads through genital contact. That puts it squarely in the middle of the Religious Right's Freakout Zone, which encompasses anything involving young women and sex.

I would've been perfectly content to accept just that explanation for the anti-Gardasil backlash, but then Michele Bachmann came out with her howler about Gardasil causing developmental disabilities. That sounded so much like what I had been hearing from Jenny McCarthy et al. that I started wondering whether anti-vaccine crankery was actually bipartisan.

There have been a lot of polls about people's attitudes toward vaccination, but I can't find very many that also include respondents' political affiliation. 

Chris Mooney wrote about two polls suggesting that anti-vaccine sentiments are spread evenly across the political spectrum: a USA Today/Gallup poll from 2009 that asked people to identify themselves as liberal, conservative or moderate and then asked them whether they had heard of Jenny McCarthy and whether they agreed with her or not; and a Pew poll, also from 2009, that asked, among lots of other things, whether children should be required to be vaccinated or whether that choice should be left to their parents.

With above photo, anti-vaccine protest signs at a Tea Party Express rally held on April 8, 2010 in St. Paul, MN. Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue

Larger version of printout attached to sign in lower half of the above pair of photos

Mike the Mad Biologist wrote about another Pew poll from 2009, this one asking people whether they would get the swine flu vaccine if it were available to them. It found Republicans and Independents more likely than not to refuse it (54% to 41%), while Democrats were almost 2:1 in favor of getting the vaccine. Republicans were also the most likely (54%), and Democrats the least (35%), to say that the news media were overstating the danger of swine flu.

Another poll, this one conducted just a couple months ago by You Gov, found that greater percentages of Republicans than Democrats said they were "not so confident" or "not confident at all" that the current vaccine schedule recommended by the Department of Health and Human Services is safe. Democrats were more likely than Republicans to say they were "very confident" or "somewhat confident," although strong majorities of both parties fall into those two groups.

That poll also asked people which conditions they think vaccines can cause, and Republicans were slightly more likely than Democrats to say vaccines cause autism.

I don't know what the New World Order is, but this graphic is a great example of attributing nefarious motivation to vaccine makers

It's also worth pointing out that there are different fears that underlie different people's opposition to vaccines. Some people might be afraid of Big Pharma profiting off their sickness; others might be afraid of the government telling them what to do with their bodies, or with their children's bodies, and other people might be afraid of the Scary Chemicals in vaccines. 

You can see appeals to all of these different fears in anti-vaccine rhetoric: most obvious (to me, at least) is the Scary Chemicals rhetoric that emphasizes what kinds of scary-sounding things are in vaccines (or, in the case of thimerosal, used to be in vaccines), but there's also the tactic of discrediting anything a medical professional says about vaccines by saying they're being paid off by the pharmaceutical companies. 

One type of anti-vaccine rhetoric I hadn't noticed before I started writing this post is the kind that objects to mandatory vaccines. Even when there's a very good reason for it, like requiring health-care workers to be fully vaccinated because they're in contact with lots and lots of 1) sick people and 2) people whose immunity is compromised.

People protesting a proposal to make swine flu vaccination mandatory for health care workers in New York state in 2009. Both photos taken by Louise McCoy for The Epoch Times

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how a libertarian-minded person, probably a lot like the people in the two Tea Party pictures above, might see mandatory vaccination as yet another unwarranted government intrusion into their affairs.  

This old article in the Seattle Weekly about the antivaccination movement in Washington state makes note of the movement's bipartisan appeal:

A closer look at [Washington state Department of Health] data reveals the potent mix of demographics that makes vaccine resistance such a sturdy presence in the state. Some of the highest [vaccine] exemption rates are in eastern Washington, where any kind of government mandate --- whether immunization or taxation --- is viewed with hostility. 

At the opposite end of the political spectrum are the liberal enclaves of western Washington, which are also resistant to vaccines. At Vashon Island's public elementary school, 25 percent of students have skipped at least one vaccine. At the Seattle Waldorf School, ... the number is a whopping 47 percent. 

These schools are part of well-educated and affluent communities that one might think would be most likely to follow the recommendations of scientists and doctors. But in fact, as journalist Seth Mnookin points out in his new book The Panic Virus, they perfectly reflect the base of today's anti-vaccine movement. Its constituents are part of what you might call the suburban counterculture --- parenthood and affluence mixed with creative aspirations, a crunchy-chewy lifestyle, and an inclination to question authority.

Finally, let's look at laws making it easier for people to opt out of vaccination.

Here is a list of states whose laws allow parents to refuse to vaccinate their children for "philosophical" reasons:

• Arizona
• Arkansas
• California
• Colorado
• Idaho
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• North Dakota
• Pennsylvania
• Ohio
• Oklahoma
• Texas
• Utah
• Vermont
• Washington
• Wisconsin

As you can see, it's a pretty mixed bag of "red states" and "blue states."