Letter: ‘Every deaf child deserves the right to life, bodily autonomy, language fluency, and to be recognized as a whole person’

Vancouver resident David E. Poland says he has come to the same conclusion of other deaf experts

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are those of the author alone and may not reflect the editorial position of ClarkCountyToday.com

After decades of studying comparing our region to other regions of our nation, I have come to the same conclusion as other deaf experts.

Greedy Medical Corporations and Eugenicists wanted deaf people dumb to keep them dependent on state handouts and make money off of their bodies.

Thank French Catholic priests and American Protestant pastors for sign language education. On the playground, French Sign Language and Martha’s Vineyard Dialect – half of the colony was born Deaf, everyone signed, and nobody was treated defective – were melted into American Sign Language. Deaf went from attics to so skilled that forty years later they hit a glass ceiling.

Then the son of the Reverend Gallaudet – who opened the first signing deaf school in Connecticut on April 15, 1817 – appealed to Congressmen and convinced them to fund the first college. President Abraham Lincoln signed their charter, which still dons the walls inside Gallaudet University, the only university on earth for the deaf.

But thriving, educated, deaf men struck fear into the hearts of followers of Sir Galton’s take on his cousin Darwin’s values. The son of a man who made up an elocution method in the United Kingdom, Alexander Bell, decided if used on deaf students instead of signed language he would become a very wealthy man. Thus he set upon the path to exploit desperate parents and sell “his” oral method. He outraged the deaf worldwide by publishing his eugenics article: “Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race.” Bell urged all government funding of signing schools to end, all deaf male teachers – who were role models to students – be fired and replaced with teenage, female, oralism teachers, and for public schools to teach deaf students that they were unfit, just to prevent deaf adults from taking their jobs.

The Deaf Dark Ages began as the campus chapels were torn down and the connection between God and right to education through visual communion was severed.

Contrast how the superintendent wrote about segregating younger students from those who signed, but today’s deaf superintendent at Washington School for the Deaf wants to remove the stigma and barriers so deaf can thrive once again. Sadly since most students arrive without a first language, many never obtain their birth potential. Due to language deprivation, they will struggle to understand.

The handicap was created by Bell’s eugenics movement, and still rages on with AGBell and the medical corporate lobbying of politicians, and keeping the public ignorant with fear-mongering pathology to maintain profit margins. Instead of drilling into the skull of a baby and taxpayers funding the bill of $50,000 per implant and supporting genetically modifying deaf children by replacing a deaf gene with a hearing gene, the solution for illiteracy and improving academic excellence is clearly establishing an American Sign Language program at Washington School for the Deaf for hearing parents and their new deaf infants – as young as age zero and as little as mildly deaf diagnosis. 100% access to language could lead to the need for an honors program next – which would scare the hell out of eugenicists!

To achieve this long-term goal to save taxpayers money, and provide dignity back to being a Deaf American again, we are going to have to fight corporate powers for equal rights that were stolen from us. I ask legislators to fully fund whatever the superintendent of our deaf school needs to set up this program in 2026, and tour the DeafSpace designed fully accessible campus.

Every deaf child deserves the right to life, bodily autonomy, language fluency, and to be recognized as a whole person.

David E. Poland, MSW
Vancouver