OPINION AND COMMENTARY

Editorials and other Opinion content offer perspectives on issues important to our community and are independent from the work of our newsroom reporters.

Where is the love for the disability community in Kansas?

July is Disability Pride Month in the U.S., a time of celebration for the disability community to coincide with the anniversary of the July 26, 1990, passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The American Bar Association defines the event as “reclaiming visibility in public and interacting fully with their disabilities out in the open.”

Ben Mattlin, who lives with spinal muscular atrophy and is author of “Disability Pride: Dispatches from a Post-ADA World,” equates disability as cutting “across all nationalities, races, orientations, genders, socioeconomic groups, and religions — perhaps the most democratic of all minority cohorts.”

Kansas lawmakers had an opportunity to make government positions more disability inclusive this year but failed to move proposed legislation forward this past session.

If passed, House Bill 2253 would have allowed Kansans with disabilities applying for government positions to have employment preference because of their disabilities. It also would have guaranteed that reasonable accommodations are provided to successfully do these jobs. Instead, after a public hearing in which many of us in the Kansas disability community provided testimony, H.B. 2253 was stricken from the legislative calendar.

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