Disciplinarian parents who ignore the viewpoint of their children may be contributing to the obesity epidemic. The tentative explanation is that children overeat to cope with stress. Parents who set out rules, but listened to their children and provided them with a sense of security, had children with the fewest weight problems.

There’s a lesson for society as a whole here. Subjecting the most vulnerable members of society to constant insecurity isn’t an incentive to try harder, it’s an incentive to find ways to alleviate the stress. No matter what obesity-pundits say, food is an effective and cheap way of reducing stress. Business and government are currently being obliged to adjust to the reality of inceasing rates of obesity. The efforts seem to be focused on setting more controls: deprive people of food, berate the character of people who have “let themselves go”, and bemoan “addiction” on all the afternoon talk shows. Perhaps instead of spending all this time and money on damage control, which seems to be rife with humiliations that will only make the problem worse, people should consider providing more checks on rankism. Allowing open season to abuse the most vulnerable members of society has resulted in a tremendous cost, and the bills are now coming due.

When George Washington University barred a depressed student from campus and attempted to intimidate him into withdrawing from school, the legal wonks immediately questioned why university administrators were even given access to this student’s private medical information.

Furthermore, a school policy of amputating the depressed is not only inherently cruel, it’s an abdication of any responsibility that the school itself had in fostering conditions that might produce depression. Anyone who has ever been a student at a major university can probably recite a litany of frustrating, contradictory, and downright wrong experiences that occured there. Often the only thing separating successful students from those who fall through the cracks is the existence of an outside social safety net. In other words, punishing a student for being depressed may amount to an act of class violence.

Perhaps someone should send the GWU administrators an anonymous copy of The Beach.

I was recently denied housing due to my credit score, even though my rental history is solid, and my landlord gave me an excellent recommendation. I had explained my situation - that I had been on disability in my 20s thanks to chronic fatigue syndrome - and at the time was overwhelmed and couldn’t handle my debts. But that didn’t matter - I had “bad credit” and was therefore an undesirable.

Fortunately, I was able to find a better place to live. But I am increasingly disturbed by the tremendous amount of weight a credit score has in our society today. Even without having had a serious illness, there are plenty of reasons why a good person might have bad credit.

A friend of mine is going through a nasty divorce. Her husband used to make upwards of $200,000. She had joint credit cards with him. When they split up, he dropped everything, including the house payments.

Now my friend, through no fault of her own but loving someone, has bad credit in the tune of a home foreclosure and six figures worth of credit card debt that she has no way to repay with her own income. Her bankruptcy was denied. She has just given up on good credit for now.

Credit scores are now being used to judge people on things that have nothing to do with credit - including rentals and job applications. People who are better at managing their debts are seen as “better people,” while those who don’t have strong money management skills or have had serious life problems are seen as “bad.”

Sometimes, even someone who hasn’t done anything wrong with their finances ends up with bad credit. My neighbor has “poor” credit not because he defaulted on credit cards, but because he never uses them!

Credit cards can be a terrible trap for many families - but that doesn’t mean that people who can’t manage them are bad people or even bad bets when it comes to basic things like housing or jobs. We all need a roof over our heads.

Basing a person’s worth on their credit score is a sure-fire way to create nobodies. A dignitarian society should find a way to use credit scores appropriately, not abuse them.

When disabled people are herded together in group homes, they become vulnerable to extreme exploitation. Disability rights advocates are fighting to address the conflicts of interest that allow legal guardians to prey on the people they’re supposed to protect.

The LiveJournal Community No Pity offers many insights into the the day-to-day struggles of the disabled and testifies to the ongoing need to defend and advance their rights as human beings.

Doctors and teachers occupy positions of high respect in our society: their pronouncements serve as stamps of approval in almost every area of endeavor. The aura of their rank also serves to blind people to abusive activities. Professional conferences and peer-reviewed journals, intended to foster standards of objectivity, may even validate and spread the abuse. For instance, journals popularize new diagnoses and aggrandize theories of discipline and contol. Abusers cite these authoritative sources when they promise parents relief from burdens associated with caring for children with special needs.

Thanks to the courage of parents who see their children as fellow human beings rather than problems, the pervasive abuse of autistic children in the name of teaching them “compliance” is now coming to light. Recent news articles have described beatings, suffocation, and deadly restraint. Many cases can be found here.

Jean Bowden spearheaded the fight to protect autistic children from the abusive use of restraints in the state of Massachussetts. After a video tape revealed the violence of the restraint methods teachers had used on her autistic daughter Abbie, Bowden confronted a solid wall of patronizing school officials, doctors, and bureaucrats, who all saw it in their professional interest to close ranks to defend an indefensible practice as a “behavior modification technique”. One of Abbie’s own doctors even offered to sell his opinion as an “expert witness”! Bowden persisted in her fight to protect her traumatized daughter, became a dedicated activist, and in 2001 Massachussetts passed a law that requires parental consent and mandatory documentation for the use of restraints.

Nothing is more rankist than posing inconvenient people as “problems” to justify dehumanization and physical violence as a scientific solution.