Leapin’ Lizards! Today is Leap Day, when an extra day is added in February every four years. Not good news for your wallet, because it means you’re paying an one more day’s worth of interest rates. Not good news for girls or guys fending off unwanted advances, because unlike the previous three years, “I’ll call you on February 29″ will not work this time around.

I’ve been wondering something about people who have February 29th birthdays. Are these leap year babies one-fourth of their age because their birthdays only comes once every four years? Think about it… 64 year olds can claim to be young because for all intents and purposes, they’re only 16.

During the non-leap years, how are birthdays celebrated? On February 28 or March 1? What if someone close to you died today? How would you commemorate that person’s death for the next three years?

I’m really curious about these things and am taking a leap of faith that you readers would provide me with some enlightment. Pun intended.

Based on my experience, twenty-nine year old Deaf women should have twelve tattoos, read Paul Auster, and have a penchant for watching Buffy shows. Based on my experience, Deaf women my age should be spending their days and nights reading the latest (and the oldest) articles about what a sentence means in ASL. Based on my experience, Deaf women should consider themselves culturally Deaf but still cherish their participation in the hearing community because they just love musicals too much.

Obviously, I do not mean what I said in the first paragraph, I’m trying to show that the “based on my experience” logic does not work. I’ve had enough training - and experience, dare I say - to see that it does not. To take one person’s experience and say that it is representative of people who have similar characteristics does not work because there is always more difference than similarity.

This blog entry is a reaction to the latest article on cochlear implants in the health section of the New York Times. The article is written from the perspective of Josh Swiller, known for his recent novel on his Peace Corps experience in Zambia. It is an interesting article that explains how the cochlear implant works for Josh. He can now talk on the phone when he couldn’t before. Good for him.

But one comment struck me as a linguist-in-training (and as a twenty-nine year old Deaf woman who likes Paul Auster and Buffy), “Mr. Swiller says based on his experience, ‘a small child with severe hearing loss should be implanted as soon as possible. Sign language can be learned down the road, but not English. It’s a no-brainer to me if you want the child to succeed in a hearing world.’ ” This statement is heavy with false claims.

One of the claims is this: Because a cochlear implant ensures that a child will successfully hear, then it follows that the child will successfully acquire spoken English. What’s wrong with this claim? Cochlear implants do not have a high success rate (Johnson 2006). Cochlear implants are not a guaranteed method for access to and subsequent acquisition of spoken language. Robert E. Johnson says this so much better than I can. So if you can read the article, please do.

The other claim is that ASL can be learned down the road but that English cannot. Behind this kind of thinking is the assumption that English is a language that cannot be acquired later in life. It also then follows that it is assumed that ASL is not a language, but rather some kind of communication system that someone can be trained in later, like writing. The last fifty years has seen a crazy growth of sign language linguists demonstrating otherwise. ASL is a language and it is acquired - not learned - in exactly the same way that English is. Linguists do agree with Swiller that language must be acquired by a certain age. But what that first language is does not seem to matter. If a child has early access to any one language, then that child will be able to acquire other languages in life. That means that a Deaf child can acquire ASL first and then acquire English later in life.

Yet another claim, and the last I’ll bring up here, is that success in a hearing world requires that one use (hear and speak) spoken English fluently. Deaf people all over the world succeed in life using signed languages as their primary language. Or, to put in terms used in the article, based on my experience, I’m doing just fine, thank you.)

A “based on my experience” generalization (meaning that what happened to me should be true for others) causes considerable harm when published in a reputable newspaper. It creates an appearance of credibility and brings readers to perceive Josh Swiller as a spokesperson for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. It perpetuates the myths of ASL not being a language, of cochlear implants being 100% successful, of cochlear implants aiding the acquisition of a spoken language. All of these myths are harmful to the Deaf community which is comprised of different individuals who have successfully (or unsuccessfully) reached certain stages in language development, career development, et cetera, in different ways. While a cochlear implant may work for one individual, it will not work for another - or, more probably for most. We cannot endorse cochlear implants as a cure-all for deafness, because it isn’t.

Well, that’s based on something beyond just my personal experience.

Note: To be fair to Josh Swiller, let’s not forget how the media can distort the original message of interviewees. In this blog, I am not attacking Josh Swiller. On the contrary, I respect and support his decision in getting a cochlear implant. Instead I am addressing the claims that were implicit in the article.

This month last year, we had a blast at Be Bar. They’ve made the place more fun so it’s time to go back! During next month’s DPHH, on March 7th, there will be a Go-Go drag show featuring the Candy Patch starring Kristina Kelly and friends starting at 11 pm. Don’t wait till the last minute though, Be Bar will waive the cover charge for DPHHers until 10 pm, afterwards it’s a $5 cover charge. So be there or be square!

Got a sweet tooth? Quench it at Be Bar where they serve up an array of Martinis flavors such as Sweet Tarts, Jolly Ranchers, Lemon Heads, Strawberry Creamsicle, and even tropical Gummi Bear martinis with peach, banana, pineapple and orange flavors. Come relax on sofas and chat the evening away. The second floor is now open so we’ll have a lot more breathing room compared to last year!

Don’t commiserate on whether to be or not to be, come to Be Bar on March 7th for a rip roaring Deaf Professional Happy Hour. This is an event for all preferences, and you don’t have to tell us what yours is!

Based on recent movie and television shows, there is an inclination that Hollywood prefers deaf actors and actresses who speak.

Regardless of talent or experience, there is an obvious preference for actors who can vocalize. Ever since the deaf acting profession lost equal ground in 1929 with the first talkie The Jazz Singer, there has been a clear preference for actors who can speak (and of course, sign).

Aside from Marlee Matlin’s portrayal of Sarah in Children of a Lesser God in 1986, there has been very few scenes with deaf actors who don’t speak throughout their appearance. I’ll give you a good example: Mr. Holland’s Opus. Anthony Natale, who acted as the adult version of Cole Holland in the aforementioned film did not speak in his role. From looking at his filmography, he has had only cameo appearances throughout his career.

Tyrone Giordano burst onto the Hollywood scene three years ago in A Lot Like Love and The Family Stone. In both films, Giordano has signed and used his voice.

Sho Stern has also been a regular on television shows such as Threat Matrix, Weeds, and Jericho. I’ve only seen her in Weeds. In her role as Megan, she signed and spoke.

Is all of this fair? No.

We have talented actors and actresses who could blossom in the movie and television industry. Russell Harvard did an excellent job portraying Cole Rowan in Law & Order: CI last year. So did Alexandria Wailes in her role as Malia on that same episode. Even Darren Frazier as Larry did an outstanding job. To the best of my recollection, none of these actors spoke throughout their appearances. However, I have to argue that up to this point, this episode of Law & Order was the most “deaf-friendly” episode ever made, with deaf extras, a strong deaf supporting cast, and full camera-view of the actors signing their lines (for the post part).

While writing this piece, I spoke with Ty Giordano on AIM, and he had this to say about the whole perspective into deaf actors:

As far as preferring to hire actors who are able to use speech, I cannot speak for the entertainment industry and its hiring practices. What I have noticed is that the deaf characters that Hollywood uses in their films and television shows tend to have some command of speech, so naturally, it makes sense to hire actors with the same ability. If there are to be more stories with actors who choose not to use their voice, then there must be more support of this idea with the writers of these shows.

So, after my conversation with Ty, I was left thinking about a multitude of things.

Whether this is something we, as a deaf community, should address, it is definitely food for thought.

It has been a long time since I’ve posted on DeafDC. Too long, in fact. My excuse is that I’ve been writing other stuff, namely a dissertation that has to be defended this term, but also a brief piece on the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill for Bionews co-written with some superb academic colleagues – geneticists Anna Middleton and Rachel Belk. (Unfortunately, the link now goes to the Bionews archives so you’ll have to enter the authors’ names to locate the actual article). So I’ll borrow a page from Jane Austen and ask your forgiveness, Dear Readers.
A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a Hearing friend about an event we had recently attended that was full of other Hearing people. At some point, my Hearing friend mentioned that there were no Deaf people at this event. I looked at my friend, and said, “But I was there!”

And this friend, in all sincerity, remarked, “Well, I think of you as Hearing.”

And I’m absolutely sure no disrespect was intended, but this little comment really took me aback.

Part of it has to do with the way that the terms Hearing and Deaf are used in the signing Deaf community – they are typically used as dyads representing the only possible positions one can adopt.

One is either affiliated with Hearing culture or Deaf culture. As much as I like Descartes, I’m not enamored of this Cartesian tendency towards insisting that things must be placed in one of two categories.

Part of this stems from my own ethnic background – I identify as having both European and Arab heritage. Being told that I must pick one or the other just feels deeply wrong to me, and I’ve never been able to get past this moral intuition.

In addition to the ‘What are you?” questions I got as a child living in a very White community in northern Orange County, California, I was also admonished by family members not to reveal my Arab roots during the 1973 OAPEC oil embargo, and later during the Iranian hostage crisis in the early 1980s. (Yes, I know that Iranians are not Arabs, but this was not common knowledge in southern California in the 1970s and 1980s, since people frequently tended to conflate Arab with Middle Eastern.)

The upshot of not revealing my heritage was that people made false assumptions about my heritage based on my olive skin, brown hair and brown eyes.

In southern California, this meant that most people assumed I was part Mexican-American. Having two grandfathers and other relatives who were conversant in Spanish did nothing to dispel this; having best friends from elementary school to high school who were fluent in Spanish contributed to these perceptions; and last but not least, having relatives of Arab descent living in Mexico and Chile reinforced this even further.

As it happens, I had enough hearing as a child to hear racist remarks about Mexicans – more than a few of them were directed at me. The remarks about Arabs usually were not aimed my way, but were also made in my presence. Both made me squirm, though for different reasons.

When I look back on this, I think about the importance of being able to name who you are and being able to stand up for those you love - who may or may not fall into different categories than your own.

As a child, I hadn’t yet learned to do that.

I like to think that I’m better at this now.

When I was assigned to the category of Hearing, something in me railed against being falsely labeled yet again. It is not because I despise Hearing people – there are many Hearing people in my life I love dearly and for whom I would go to the ends of the earth.

The reason my stomach lurched was because it seemed to dismiss a big part of who I am and all that I have done to fight for my own communication access – starting in college with the first ADA claim that I filed with the Justice Department and continuing through today.

(An aside - I think the last claim I filed on a national level was in 2007 dealing with violations of FCC emergency captioning, or maybe it was a TSA complaint related to air travel? I forget. You get my point – advocating for communication access is part and parcel of my very being.)

I didn’t do these things as a Hearing person – a Hearing person would have no reason to fight for her own communication access in a world designed to meet the needs of Hearing people.

Just to mix things up a bit, for the past few years, I’ve had an ongoing dialogue with several Deaf of Deaf friends, who tell me that I am Deaf and that I should just accept this.

I resist this definition for a different reason – I was mainstreamed, I still use my residual hearing and my voice, and English is my first language.

Having said all that, I deeply cherish the signing Deaf community and the friends I have made within it. I continue to work everyday on improving my ASL, and am honored to be included in this community. I owe much to this community, and I do what I can to reciprocate. Somehow, making the claim that I am Deaf feels false to me – I don’t want to be a Deaf wannabe and I fear that claiming community membership might appear inauthentic in some way.

So what’s left?

I’m not fully at ease calling myself ‘a person with hearing loss’, because I am a philosopher by training, and believe that to be a person with hearing loss means that one must feel she has lost something. Yet I haven’t lost anything – or not that I can recall. (For those of you who like philosophy, I’m thinking about the distinction between privation and deprivation here).

I could always fall back on ‘hard of hearing’ and in the past I’ve made an argument for reclaiming this slightly pejorative term vis-à-vis ‘queer’ or ‘gimp’. Some days I like this idea; other days I’m less enamored of it. In recent years, I’ve had a number of Deaf people tell me that calling oneself ‘hard-of-hearing’ is akin to being an Uncle Tom. (I can’t help but savor the irony of a family connection that traces back to the woman who coined that term).

So far, I haven’t been persuaded by this argument. I think it rests on how one defines hard-of-hearing. My preliminary research indicates that the historical record of this term provides some evidence for defining a hard of hearing person as one who shifts between the Hearing and Deaf worlds. As I see it, this is not unlike being part Arab-American and part European-American and embracing both.

These days I’m not so sure how to label myself.

But two things resonate for me.

First: it seems to be a central tenet of human dignity to allow people the freedom to make their own claims about their identities. Anything less seems to encroach on basic human liberty.

And second:

I’m not Hearing.

Several days ago, I blogged about my concerns with GoAmerica outsourcing a chunk of its text relay services to the Philippines. Afterwards, I had a very pleasant and eye-opening videophone conversation with Gerald “Jerry” Nelson, Director of Regulatory and Strategic Affairs for GoAmerica / HOVRS. That, in addition, to some of the counterpoint comments to my recent blog post, has given me a better perspective on this issue — and I hope that this blog post will help inform many others as well.

During my conversation with Jerry, I told him that I’d been using IP-Relay’s text services for years — via the Internet, via instant messaging, and via its “My IP Relay Number” personal phone number. I told him I’d tried out numerous other text-based relay services, and had always come back to IP-Relay because of its consistency and high quality services. And knowing that GoAmerica now owned IP-Relay, I asked him what GoAmerica would do to assure quality services for IP-Relay’s text-based services.

Jerry then dropped a bombshell on me: a good chunk of IP-Relay’s text services had already been routed through the same call center in the Philippines for the past three years! Back when MCI was operating IP-Relay, it opened a call center in the Philippines. This move was not widely publicized because MCI wanted to minimize the same concerns I shared in my recent blog post. I had just told Jerry that I was happy with IP-Relay’s high quality services, and it turns out some of that was indeed through the Philippines call center!

Let me start at the beginning — or more than fifteen years ago when national relay services first began. The various telecommunication companies recognized that accents and regional dialects could cause communication problems. It was quite jarring for hearing customers in, say, California to hear a relay operator using a mid-western accent. Likewise for New Yorkers hearing Southern accents. And regional dialects meant that different operators might use different words to mean the same thing. These telecommunication companies hired people to work with relay operators to smooth out their accents and regional dialects, and complaints about accents and dialects decreased. Nowadays, relatively few complaints are received about accents, especially compared to the volume of calls being made.

When MCI decided to open a call center for text relay services in the Philippines, they considered several advantages: the Philippines had a modern culture much like that of the United States, and English is spoken there almost as commonly as the native language (and in fact is not considered a “second language” there). And, of course, cost savings had to be considered — opening this call center would help MCI remain competitive and keep revenues high. When the Philippines call center opened, they conducted the same trainings as conducted at US-based call centers to smooth out any accents or dialects the operators may have. And deaf callers like me (and perhaps hearing callers as well) had no idea that some of their calls were being routed though relay operators living in the Philippines for the past three years!

A month ago, GoAmerica installed a tool to cut back on international calls, a vast majority of which was being used as part of fraud schemes upon unwary businesses and people. This tool had much success in preventing these fraudulent calls, but a side effect was a much less call volume being experienced at its call center. Numerous relay agents now sat idle. And so, a business decision was made to downsize (but not eliminate) the call centers. As Jerry said, this had a negative financial impact on GoAmerica, but preventing fraud calls in the best interest of relay users was the right thing to do.

A side note: text relay calls being made as part of State relay contracts continue to be routed through the Memphis and California call centers and not through the Philippines. And all Video Relay Services are still being provided entirely within the United States. In addition, according to Jerry, GoAmerica’s acquisitions and merger has made it the nation’s largest provider of text relay services and the second largest VRS provider (behind Sorenson).

I don’t know about you, but I definitely feel better about GoAmerica’s plans.  And yes, I definitely plan on continuing to use IP-Relay’s text relay services.

The Virginia Tech shootings last year partially fed into a stereotype society tends to have about killers: they’re odd, strange, violent individuals that we can spot from a mile away. The reality was that Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter who murdered classmates and professors, was mentally ill. His illness manifested itself in rather frightening ways, such as “morbid and grotesque” class assignments.

Although the student body, faculty, and staff of Virginia Tech, along with the rest of us, were shocked, the profile that emerged conformed to images we have of criminals: deviant, threatening strangers. They’re never people that we really know, people that we spend time with, people that we trust.

Now, less than a year later, we have another campus shooting, this time at Northern Illinois University. This time, unlike Cho, the killer is described as “quiet, dependable, and fun-loving.” Steven Kazmierczak’s ex-girlfriend characterized him as someone who “wasn’t erratic. He wasn’t delusional. He was Steve; he was normal.” This assessment feeds into another stereotype: the nice, gentle boy, the kind that neighbors interviewed by reporters always describe as “the last person you’d imagine doing this awful thing.”

So we have the Monster and the Saint. But the reality is far more complex. As this article explains, Kazmierczak had mental problems, had “disturbing tattoos,” and had recently developed an interest in guns. Far from being a black-and-white caricature, the NIU gunman was many shades of grey, just like the majority of us.

In the battle over gun control and access to guns, there’s a lot of black-and-white arguments. But the truth is there’s a large, ambiguous middle– and that middle ground terrifies me. The moderate position is that guns are somehow okay when used by certain people in certain situations. This viewpoint is part of the reason why the reactions to these tragic events have prompted not just a resurrection of the gun control debate, but a reassessment by a lot of people on the issue of whether to have and use guns at all.

Yesterday, CNN carried a piece about college students in Utah, a state where concealed gun permits allow gun owners to carry weapons onto college campuses, among other public locations. Currently, the state legislature is considering modifying this right even further; if a pending bill passes, it will permit current concealed-weapons owners to carry these guns unconcealed in places like college campuses, hospitals, and sports venues.

I’m not so sure that’s wise. In the CNN article about students, the bill’s sponsor, Utah State Representative Curtis Oda stated, “When you see someone with a gun, you are looking at some of the most law-abiding people in the state.”

That might be, but I’m thinking more about a student quoted at the beginning of the article: “Nick” commented on his decision to carry a gun, saying “Last year, after Virginia Tech, I thought ‘I’m not going to be a victim.” From one perspective, that’s an understandable reaction. Who wants to end up dead in the morgue due to a rogue classmate?

But then I think: it’s easy to say that about the “monsters.” Can you say the same about the “saints”? Just how far are we willing to let things go until a mistake turns into a tragedy?

Then I noticed later in the day yesterday a news item that exemplified that for me. Just a mere 45-minute drive from my home,

An ROTC student carrying a nonfunctioning rifle on the campus of Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson prompted a large police response after students reported that they had seen a man carrying what appeared to be an assault rifle on school grounds, authorities said today.

Fortunately, the authorities quickly assessed the situation and realized no threat was posed. But what might have happened if in the interim, “Nick” or someone like him decided that rather than being a victim, now was the time to act, rather than react? What if someone who was a legally licensed gun owner who carried a gun on campus decided to shoot that ROTC student, in the mistaken belief that it was another Cho or Kazmierczak?

What if a student, who under every other circumstance was a normal, outgoing student, got an “F” or “D” in their class, confronted their professor, and decided to respond in the heat of the moment with the gun they had strapped around their belt?

As Kevin Rechtenbach commented in the CNN article,

“If acts of terrorism continue on campus, then I will have no choice but to carry a concealed weapon”…

“But you see, that is where the problem lies: Everybody will end up carrying concealed weapons, and everyday problems will be solved with guns rather than words or even fists.”

This is one of the concerns I have about easy, free gun access in places like college campuses: students that age are still growing, still maturing, still experimenting. There’s a reason why many male criminals in prison are in their late teens and early twenties; raging testosterone combined with immaturity and incomplete judgment processing skills make for a volatile mix. It’s bad enough when it’s fists; why throw guns into the mix?

I disagree with Rechtenbach: there is always a choice. But that choice is not just his, it’s ours as well. Do we as a society limit access to weapons, or do we permit the increased possibility of a shootout at the student union? Is there a grey area here where a balance can be struck? Or is it a black-and-white issue? Hovering over all this is an unanswered question: how many more tragic school shootings will we allow ourselves to endure before we finally resolve the seemingly never-ending battle over gun control?

Reddit.com is one of my favorite sites. If you haven’t check it out yet, do so. So, I was looking at it today and found this story: Here are the photos of the CNN Closed Captioning.

It’s not every day that closed captioning is a story on Reddit’s front page, so off I clicked, and found these images.

Apparently, the captionist accidentally typed “Al Qaeda” when it should read “Hillary Clinton.” As is the immutable nature of the internets, a firestorm ensued in the comments section on both DemocraticUnderground and Reddit, with dozens accusing the captionist and CNN of bias.

One self-righteous commenter wrote:

I could *perhaps* forgive “Osama” if “Obama” was meant. As a proofreader, I know that shit happens. But how can you explain typing in, correctly, Al Quada, if you meant HRC? Somebody was trying to be either malicious or “funny,” and my money is on the former rather than the latter.

This, combined with MSNBC’s “accidental” display of a photo of Osama bin Laden while Tweety was talking about Obama is just too frigging coincidental and inexcusable.

Media have lost ALL credibility now. And it’s only gonna get worse should Obama win the nomination. Guaranteed.

Please. Thankfully, there are some rational people out there, who responded with reason.

but if you knew anything about the process and what captioners have to do, and how good they really are at what they do, you’d know it wsn’t intentional. The best captioner in the world doesn’t have the ability to know ahead of time what a person is going to say and think up something witty and devilish like that, in less than a fraction of a second, and make it flow with the rest of what a person said.

It’s impossible.

And from AnteChronos on Reddit:

They actually use a stenotype machine hooked up to a computer. It converts the phonetic information they type into readable text. The problem is with proper nouns, which require special dictionary entries. Those entries may not even be completely phonetic based on the word being used, to avoid collisions with possible homophones. A good stenocaptioner will have hundreds (or even thousands, depending on what they’re going to be captioning) of personalized shortcuts memorized.

It’s easy to imagine that a sudden “brain fart” could cause the captioner to hit the wrong chord on the stenotype machine. Especially if the custom dictionary isn’t being strictly phonetic. Also, I’d imagine that a captioner for a huge media outlet like CNN would have a huge number of shortcuts. The names of all of the presidential candidates; congress-critters; supreme court justices; US states and major cities; foreign countries, capitals, and major cities; foreign heads of state and dignitaries; major historical people and events; major corporations and organizations; etc. Frankly, I’m astonished that this type of thing doesn’t happen more often.

If you clicked on that link to AnteChronos’ comment, you’ll see another one bringing up Hanlon’s Razor. Essentially, it is a truism which reads: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

That’s an important point to remember, and Hanlon’s Razor can be applied to so many situations. I sometimes wonder if we, as marginalized people, are far more quick to accuse people of oppressive or malicious actions when, in reality, the offenders are just being stupid. Gallaudet. AGBell. Captionists. The VR counselor. The list goes on.

In any case, it’s funny to see hearing people work themselves into a tizzy over a closed captioning typo–something we deal with on a daily basis. Nothing to see here, people. Move along.

According to a recent Modesto Bee newspaper article, GoAmerica has begun outsourcing its Internet relay services to a new call center in the Philippines.

As I explained in a recent blog post, GoAmerica operates the popular i711 relay service as well as a number of other state-based relay services, and had taken over Verizon’s relay service. In addition, GoAmerica recently merged with Hands On Video Relay Service (HOVRS). As a result, GoAmerica is now one of the largest relay service providers in the nation.

As part of this outsourcing process, and according to the Modesto Bee article, GoAmerica will be giving layoff notices to hundreds of relay operators and staff at the Riverbank, California call center. GoAmerica will begin routing its Internet-based relay calls through the new call center in the Philippines. At this point, this only seems to affect Internet-based relay calls made through GoAmerica’s services. That is, you’re making an Internet-based relay call when you make text relay calls via i711’s webpage or make calls via instant messaging through one of GoAmerica’s services. Video relay calls are not affected (yet?).

So, it’s not good news that a large provider like GoAmerica has begun the process toward outsourcing a significant number of relay operator jobs outside the United States. This may cause a significant impact on how deaf and hearing people interact with each other through the telephone. And I wonder how GoAmerica will maintain the quality of relay calls when using operators that are based outside the country. I’m not familiar enough with relay call procedures to know whether “Deaf English” is translated / transliterated into smooth spoken English, but I’m uncertain this would happen at a call center outside the United States. Lastly, hearing people and businesses are already wary of getting calls from telemarketers as well as scam calls through a relay service. I fear that businesses will hang up at a much greater rate when they receive relay calls from outside the country.

I use Internet-based relay calls quite a bit — in fact, about the same amount as my video relay calls. I often use Verizon’s IP-Relay services via instant messaging on my Palm Treo, or through its webpage interface. And guess what? Since GoAmerica owns these Verizon services, that means soon I’ll have a relay operator who’s based in the Philippines.

I don’t know about you, but if this affects the quality of my relay service then I may start frequenting a different relay service.

In rape cases in close-knit communities, it often seems best to leave judgment to those charged with that task. This story out of New Jersey in which a 19-year-old deaf male is charged with the rape of a 16-year-old deaf female classmate at Mountain Lakes High School is probably no exception.

Still, it’s hard not to get angry after reading this story, even leaving aside the he-said, she-said qualities of this story, and for reasons that have nothing to do with the case itself.

For one, the deaf factor in this story is taking center stage. “Deaf” is the first word in the headline (usually, copy editors are advised to put the most important or eye-catching words first). The news of the rape charge is buried between descriptions of the defendant’s deafness and his “special class for the hearing-impaired” in the first paragraph alone. Whether this is a sensationalist tactic on the part of the journalist, or the de facto influence of those dealing with the case, I’m not sure. Either way, for those directly involved with the case, the issue is primarily deciding whether a rape happened and whether the defendant needs to be sentenced. Seems to me the journalist’s views on just how interesting Deaf people are have skewed the way this story needs to be told.

For another, the defendant’s lawyer has capitalized on the clear bias some people hold toward viewing deafness primarily as a pathological and isolating disability.

“He was an A-plus student. He is a poster boy for how to overcome handicaps,” said defense lawyer Paul Faugno. “What’s really very unfortunate is that this boy has overcome so much adversity in his life. To have this adversity presented to him now is really a shame.”

Certainly, in some places this mythology ends up being true (usually because the belief in deafness as a debilitating quality becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy), and I don’t know enough about the school, the community, local culture, and/or the individual students involved to appropriately throw in a defense of deaf people as perfectly capable of living lives as variable as any other human life. But none of that is the issue here.

The issue, according to Faugno, is that an A-plus student is being faced with “adversity” in the shape of rape allegations. There’s a number of inferences you can draw here, none of them appropriate for him to make about a deaf defendant or about this particular case. One possible inference is that students who earn better grades are less likely to rape other students. Or that a deaf student who earns an A has overcome some insurmountable obstacle, represented, of course, by the fact that his ears don’t perform the way his hearing audience expects. Or a that a student who has to face criminal charges and be deaf at the same time is really a pitiful shame, a double tragedy. Regardless of his own understanding of his deaf client, it’s pretty easy to see what assumptions about his audiences’ views Faugno is relying on.

In The Record’s story, details about how the alleged assault happened and the defense’s response comes chronologically after all of this. Since this story is primarily formatted as a hard news story, it’s not hard to determine which information editors felt was more important to readers. Definitely not issues of consent, age, or the law, it seems.

And the kicker in this sob-story: Mommy’s playing sign language interpreter at the court hearing.