Read the opinion

This is the first of a number of decisions expected from the Court in the next few weeks clarifying the disability civil rights law. This first decision, say activists, is a sign the court truly views the ADA as the civil rights law it was designed to be.

The justices sent Cleveland's case back to the lower court to be re-heard. The lower court could not automatically throw out the case simply because Cleveland got Social Security benefits, said the Court, because the Social Security Act and the ADA were designed to do different things; using one did not stop you from using the other, they said.

" The ADA defines a 'qualified individual' to include a disabled person 'who . . . can perform the essential functions' of her job 'with reasonable accommodation,' " Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in the opinion. But "[w]hen the [Social Security Administration] determines whether an individual is disabled for SSDI purposes, it does not take the possibility of 'reasonable accommodation' into account."

"An ADA suit claiming that the plaintiff can perform her job with reasonable accommodation may well prove consistent with an SSDI claim that the plaintiff could not perform her own job (or other jobs) without it," said the court.

"It's a victory for the concept of 'reasonable accommodation,'" said one disability rights activist.

"Integration, not Segregation" signs were everywhere: written on t-shirts, buttons, flags, banners, signs, hats, and stickers.

Chanting "Our homes, not nursing homes," the rally heard speakers from Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) to Pennsylvania Gov. Dick Thornburgh speak out on the importance of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Marchers filed into the street to wheel and walk the four blocks from the rally site to the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court, where what ADAPT called "a magnificent wave of people" -- 4,000 strong, according to U. S. Capitol police -- gathered before the Supreme Court to send a message to justices deciding the fate of the ADA's "integration mandate" in the case Olmstead. v. L.C. and E.W. "Our liberty, our freedom, our right to choice, these are fundamental rights," said national ADAPT organizer Stephanie Thomas. "If the court can't recognize these basic human rights, we must continue the fight. Victory will be ours."

Lott's disingenuous grandstanding relates to the fact that the bill is for people on Social Security Disability Insurance -- which is a program not just for poor people but all Americans, as is Social Security in general, said one activist. S331 will let disabled people now drawing Social Security disability benefits to work without forfeiting Medicare coverage.

On May 6, Mississippi's Coalition for Citizens with Disabilities activists gathered outside of Lott's Jackson and Pascagoula state offices to push for action.

In a May 4 opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D. -Calif.) a co-sponsor, urged Lott to bring the bill to the floor for a vote. The House version of the bill (H.R. 1180) continues to move, with 111 cosponsors -- 31 Republicans and 80 Democrats.

The Portland-based managed care company, then named the Ethix Corp., was purchased by New York Life in late 1994, according to a May 1997 Oregon Business Journal story.

More on this in the upcoming July/August Ragged Edge.

"The Web is such a critically important information resource that we have to make sure it does not shut people out," Judy Brewer, director of the Consortium's 18-month-old Web accessibility initiative told the New York Times's Cybertimes reporter Pamela Mendels.

The guidelines call for providing alternative text for images, ensuring that information is available to a person who cannot see images, and captions for audio files, to make information available to someone who cannot hear audio -- for whatever reason.

Accessible design benefits all Web users, said the W3C, because it allows "device-independence" for Web content.

"There are too many risks at stake for persons with disabilities to embrace assisted suicide," Californians for Disability Rights told Aroner in a recent letter. "Forced euthanasia" was not an impossibility, they said, "especially in a climate where hate crimes are not unheard of, where medical costs are a growing concern, and where acceptance of disability by general society is a goal we have yet to achieve."

Calling assisted suicide "a dangerous practice that could all too easily be abused," the group urged Aroner to consider the need for "access to health care, palliative care, home health care, and hospice care" -- all of which "influence a person's desire to live."

Singer, perhaps best known for his "animal rights" work, argues that many human beings, including infants and some older people with cognitive disabilities, are not entitled to the same moral consideration as other human beings and many non-human animals. Not Dead Yet has pointed out that Singer advocates the selective infanticide of disabled infants when their parents might have non-disabled replacements, when their organs might be transplanted to other infants and when they are using resources that might be used elsewhere. Singer is known as a supporter of assisted suicide and euthanasia.

"Singer's core vision, that the life of a person with a disability is worth less than the life of a person without a disability, and therefore it is okay to kill infants with disabilities if that is what the parent wants to do, amounts to a defense of genocide" Bristo told the crowd. "It is sad that just as Dr. Kevorkian has finally been recognized in a court of law as being a criminal for acting on the basis of similar beliefs in the case of physician-assisted suicide, Princeton sees fit to hire a proponent of infanticide to teach ethics to undergraduates."