The idea of Disability Rights has served as a heuristic for our community for centuries, in small local ways, and for the last half-century as a global organizing framework (a scaffold) for the pursuit of personal autonomy and real choice.
In the process, our community has deepened and enriched the idea of civil rights to embrace the many ways that the context of personal autonomy and choice has on making those values real in the world. More than just the concept of context framing the possibilities of freedom, we have concretely defined, repeatedly, the many real ways the nature of the context can limit or support personal autonomy.
In fact, this exploration of the ways that the larger social context, in both cultural assumptions, infrastructure, and ideas about the meaning of disability, is the most important way that personal autonomy and choice are constrained, far more than the particulars of any disability characteristic.
Our community has explored the possibility space of Disability Rights to expand the impact of our insights and our advocacy practice on the larger world. That effort has resulted in a significant increase in personal possibility over these decades and the increasing sophistication of our advocacy.
At the same time, the model we have used is increasingly brittle, given the larger political and economic evolution of our society, in particular, and globally. This kind of limitation is true of all heuristics. They are never silver bullets but must always be judged in terms of their current strategic effectiveness.
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