Ways in which mentally disabled, mentally challenged and mentally ill people are oppressed

Ways in which mentally disabled, mentally challenged and mentally ill people are oppressed:

1) Disproportionately homeless.

2) Terrorized by cops in ghettos

3) Have been subjected to barbaric practices like eugenics and "mercy killings".

4) Get killed their disabilities just like racial minorities get killed for their race, gays get killed for being gay.

5) Attempts by scientists in Bourgeois societies to "cure" them.

6) Slashing and privitizing of healthcare denies many of them treatment.
7) Slashing of welfare which benefits many of the disabled.
8) Slashing of vocational services which benefit the disabled.

9) Were victims of the Holocaust.

10) Denied jobs for their disabilities.

The late biologist and essayist Stephen Jay Gould, in "Of Wasps and WASPs," gives two related reasons. First, Kinsey's work was based on the principle that variation itself is the fundamental reality of nature. The key principle here, as Gould puts it, is that "species...have no immutable essence" [emphasis added]. That is, there is no "norm," no abstract baseline for what is the "right" or "ideal" form of a species. Thus to understand a given population, variations within it must be studied, and the larger the sample the better. Obviously this relates directly to Kinsey's sex research.

The second important aspect of seeing variation as the raw material of evolution is in its social impact. Like many great ideas and innovations, evolutionary principles arose in conflict with older ways of thinking. Evolution directly counterposes itself both to the rigid, authoritarian, unchanging precepts of religion and to what is ultimately merely religion's secular guise, the philosophy of "idealism." Living things—wasps, flowers, people—do not have an "immutable essence," or "ideal form" around which variations cluster. In real life, each one is individual, and that individuality itself is one of their most valuable aspects. Kinsey's ability to extend this approach to human beings, and to their sexual behavior, enabled him to extract, with great sensitivity and patience, amazingly frank sexual histories from people of all social classes and backgrounds.

There are broader social implications, as Gould notes: "Antiessentialist thinking forces us to view the world differently.... We lose criteria for judgment by comparison to some ideal: short people, retarded people, people of other beliefs, colors, and religions are people of full status." To put it another way, to hate and fear change and variation is a hallmark of reaction and religious superstition.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/archives/oldsite/2005/Kinsey-839.html In Defense of Sex and Science - Kinsey - A Review by Helen Cantor Workers Vanguard No. 839, 7 January 2005