Since it is unlikely that anyone else is going to stand up for my friend Mary Ellen Synon, I may as well, especially as I had the singular honour of trying to put her article in perspective on Joe Duffy's Liveline programme the other day. Her words from the Sunday Independent were quoted as if they were an extract from Mein Kampf rather than the outline of a challenging and unconventional opinion which was, I will say now, expressed in glib and sometimes appallingly bad taste.
Mary Ellen was critical of the Paralympics, the athletic games "for the lame and the blind". She hesitated, she said, to use the word "grotesque" about the games, and settled for the word "perverse". Physical competition, she wrote, is about finding the best. It is not about finding someone who can wobble his way round a track in a wheelchair, or who can swim from one end of a pool to another by Braille. There simply wasn't any equivalence between what cripples do and what true athletes do.
Grotesque
Now, in using language like this, she was asking for trouble, and deservedly got it. Worse was to follow. She said: "Stephen Hawkings showed his wisdom by staying out of the three-legged race."
This is grotesque. Stephen Hawkings cannot speak and has no control over his body or his bodily functions. Her sketch is cruel and inexcusable and stupid. Yet that doesn't mean that the questions Mary Ellen - I repeat, at this unpopular hour, my friend - raises about the Paralympics are unfair, however dreadfully she phrased them; and the response she has provoked, and the language that response has used, suggests that there is a great deal of woolly thinking about people with disabilities, or cripples, as Mary Ellen inaccurately calls them.
There is nothing wrong with the word cripple. It is a limited word, but it is truthful one. If I lose a leg - as many in the Paralympics have - I am crippled. However, only some in the games are actually "crippled". There are autistic athletes with very high IQs who are in no sense physically handicapped, and none who need pity. I especially liked Lisa Llorens, the autistic sprinter who is obsessed with cheetahs, and who declared: "I know I live in a world of my own, but I'm happy. It's a wonderful world to be in, if a little lonely one most of the time."
No one, and certainly not Mary Ellen, thinks these people should not do what they want. She merely dislikes the equivalence between the Paralympics and Olympics. One critic said she was against equality for disabled people. Another accused her on Liveline of wishing to segregate disabled people from the main body of the population.
Inegalitarian
One second, please. The Paralympics are the quintessence of inegalitarianism, for otherwise every athlete would come last in an amiably equal dead-heat. Moreover, the Paralympics are by definition a segregation of the disabled from the able-bodied. You cannot have competition between people who must have a disability to qualify for that competition without making segregation and inequality the defining standards of the competition. Indeed, they are so intrinsic to the culture of the Paralympics that they have become invisible to the games' defenders.
Mary Ellen's real target is the myth of egalitarianism - that we live in a world in which "all cultures, all lives, all philosophies" are equal in value. That is the line which has been compared to fascism. It is not fascist, for we know it to be true. Is the culture of the Third Reich equal to ours? We know it to be inferior. Is its philosophy inferior to ours? Yes, absolutely. And whose life is superior, Adolf Eichmann's or that of someone who works in the Anne Sullivan Foundation for the Deaf and Blind? Need we continue?
It is not a complex argument. It is a simple one; but it is so fraught with misunderstanding and it is so easy to offend the vulnerable, the already disadvantaged, that it has to be phrased very carefully indeed. This Mary Ellen did not do. She has fatally damaged her case, which is a shame, because the myth of egalitarianism is one of the great heresies of our age.
Society's assistance
Law cannot enable the disabled. It cannot right the gross wrongs of blindness, deafness, limblessness or a confused or damaged brain. It is simply silly to pretend that the assistance which society gives disabled people is evidence of equality. It is the reverse.
It is evidence of inequality when legislatures recognise disability, and with equal propriety create unequal but just laws to cope with the consequences.
Arthur O'Reilly of the National Rehabilitation Board has called for a constitutional amendment to protect the disabled from discrimination. Ah. Another constitutional amendment, another plaything for the courts: just what we need. In truth, discrimination is one of the pillars of civilisation. It enables you to favour individuals who need help, without helping those who don't. Discrimination empowers you to feed those who cannot feed themselves but not those who will not. Discrimination is the justification of the Paralympics. It is, at bottom, the very basis of society.