There’s a certain type of homeless advocate that wants poor unhoused people to stay in the streets, even if they’re severely mentally ill. They tend to be identified in the media as “disability rights” advocates and claim that any attempt to shelter people against their will is an unconstitutional deprivation of their civil rights.
I don’t trust these “disability rights” advocates. I learned about them 20 years ago, when my mom was dying of cancer and wished for her doctors to kill her with drugs. Today, California has the “Death With Dignity” Act that would have allowed that to happen, but back then, there was no such provision. I became involved with a local group that was fighting for it. Do you know who the chief opponents were? Disability rights advocates. They argued that assisted suicide was a “slippery slope.” Today, they claimed, it might apply to someone like my mother. The next day, it would be the elderly with walkers, whom they said society wanted to get rid of. These advocates played on the fears and guilt of the majority population. Fortunately, Californians didn’t believe them, and the Death With Dignity act became law.
The latest appearance of this type is a coalition of three such groups-- Disability Rights California, Western Center on Law and Poverty and the Public Interest Law Project—that last month asked the California Supreme Court to strike down Gov. Newsom’s CARE Courts. Under Newsom’s proposal, a relatively small handful of the most outrageously crazy homeless people—the ranters and hallucinators—would be forced into hospitalization and rehab at the behest of their families.
That this makes perfect sense is undeniable. These poor souls have no ability to care for themselves, making them dangerous to themselves and others. They have no right to roam our streets, interfering with innocent passersby and businesses, relieving themselves publicly. No normal society in the history of the world has permitted such individuals the privilege of free passage. Gov. Newsom, who as a politician probably has had more experience with the problem of homelessness than any other in America, is to be commended for a wise and necessary program. Whether or not CARE Court actually can work, and whether it can be funded, are yet to be determined, but CARE Court deserves to be rolled out and tried.
Which makes it all the more problematic that these “disability rights” advocates oppose it. The lawsuit I referred to above says that CARE Court, if enacted, “will violate due process and equal protection rights under the state constitution, while needlessly burdening fundamental rights to privacy, autonomy and liberty.” The lawsuit claims that CARE Court also will “rob unhoused Californians of their autonomy to choose their own mental health treatment and housing and threatens their liberty…This ‘solution’ will not work and will deprive thousands of people of their constitutional rights.”
Let me explain something to these “disability rights” advocates. Psychotic people have no right to wander and befoul our streets. Every civilized society has always had the ability to limit the freedom of lawbreakers, anti-socials and lunatics. The suggestion that these psychotics can “choose their own mental health treatment” is absurd and insulting to our intelligence: it’s like saying that a gunshot victim who’s bleeding out has the right to choose which hospital he’s brought to, who’s driving the ambulance, and which doctor stitches him up. What “liberty” is threatened by CARE Court? The “liberty” of sick people to lay in a gutter, covered in urine, forcing innocent pedestrians to cross the street to avoid her? The “liberty” of psychotics to overturn waste bins and smash bus stop windows? The “liberty” of maniacs to scream obscenities as they stagger through traffic? What planet are these “disability rights” advocates living on?
It’s people like them that are shoving Oakland into the dump. They share the mentality of the people who want the Wood Street encampment to remain a dirty, incendiary slum. Whatever their motive—and in the end, it’s irrelevant—their actions are dire and harmful. It’s time to clean up our streets, rebuild our city, and get on with things.
Steve Heimoff