When you wanted to get married, what did you have to do? Did you take a test? Did someone observe your cooking or budgeting skills? Were you quizzed on your emotional IQ? I am guessing you said “no”. Did you know that this is not the case for individuals with disabilities?
Marissa Debellis talks about these restrictions and how to increase sexual rights for disable individuals in her article “A Group Home Exclusively for Married Couples with Developmental Disabilities: A Natural Next Step”. Individuals with developmental disabilities who wish to marry are often required to prove that they have the skills necessary to do so. According to… “The law does not require you to prove that you can iron and wash clothes, and cook dinners, and balance a budget and wash the floor before you can get married. You don’t have to prove that you’re competent in any of those areas, and yet that’s what we’re telling them [disabled individuals]. So, we’re not treating them live everyone else. We’re singling them out and we’re denying them their rights based on criteria that have nothing to do with marriage”.
How did we get to the point where your ability to love/express love is based on pre-requisite skills? A lot of it goes back to the fact that individuals with disabilities still experience a lot of discrimination, despite laws attempting to curb this. In an attempt to protect disabled individuals, states make their own laws about what a legal marriage looks like. Some states require that an individual be able to “concentrate, understand, communicate, reason and recognize objects and people”. How is this measured? What does communicate mean? Are we denying rights to individuals simply because we cannot understand their communication (it seems like the fault is on us in that instance). How many objects/people do you have to recognize? And how in the world does concentration equal a happy marriage? If concentration is our golden standard then we just voided a whole bunch of marriages!
People are trying to protect individuals with disabilities. I get it and there are times when I agree with that being the goal. But in trying to protect individuals we are denying basic freedoms. I also think that we are trying to protect ourselves. Sexuality is often seen as an uncomfortable subject; even more so when we discuss the sexuality of individuals with disabilities. I feel like we are trying to relieve our anxiety and discomfort by requiring individuals to act in a way that makes us feel comfortable. So, while there is still so much to work through and unpack in the area of sexuality and disability I think that the first thing that people need to do is self-evaluate. We need to pause and ask ourselves:
- “Is this topic/person/action making me uncomfortable?”
- “Why is it making me uncomfortable”
- “Am I putting restrictions in place so that I will feel better?”
- “Are my assumptions minimizing this individual’s humanity?”.
Resources: