Rights of the disabled - screwed by right wing lies.

Did you think that the right wing crazy ship that sailed through the election had faded into obscurity?  Kind of dropped below the horizon, slowly dropping out of sight?

Think again.

Today, the Senate failed, by five votes, to muster the 2/3rds vote needed to ratify the Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities, an international treaty intended to push for the rights of the disabled in other countries - which would require the rest of the world to meet the standards that Americans already enjoy under the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act.

Why?

World Net Daily (WND), a conservative website which pushes birther fantasies and other conspiracies, announced on Sunday that it had hired former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum “to offer exclusive opinion each Monday.”

Well, you see, Santorum has a disabled daughter, and his opinion of this bill is:

The staunchly anti-abortion Republican worried that the treaty would “put the government, acting under U.N. authority, in the position to determine for all children with disabilities what is best for them.” 

And taking that thought to its absurd conclusion, Santorum suggested that the U.N. treaty would have meant the death of his daughter, who has a rare genetic disorder. 

“In the case of our 4-year-old daughter, Bella, who has Trisomy 18, a condition that the medical literature says is ‘incompatible with life,’ would her ‘best interest’ be that she be allowed to die?” he asked. 

“Some would undoubtedly say so.”

 So, a bill that was intended to assist other countries in becoming more enlightened about treating people with disabilities better, more like our own flawed but increasingly improving system, is excoriated for being intended to let them die?

Some people are simply amazing in their ignorance - or maybe it is simply their mean-spiritedness.