Democratic Underground user Heather MC picks up on the idea that Mitt Romney has Asperger's syndrome and says some disturbing things:
This would explain so much, the mean sprited jokes he thinks are funny. His inablity to connect with people. The make him human issues his campaign is having.
And is inability to connect empathically with a Women standing right infront of him who just became homeless in an instant.I am not posting this to make light of Autism or Autistic people, my youngest son is on the spectrum. I truely believe this is what's wrong with Mitt. And I think he has gone his entire life undiagnosed. And if someone is Running for President with any kind of health issue we need to know about it. He could say the wrong thing to a world leader and we could all pay the price for it.
So-- Heather has a son on the spectrum. And she thinks autistic people are "mean spirited" and that something is wrong with us. And someone with Asperger's should never be president because he might "say the wrong thing to a world leader."
This is similar to what Joe Scarborough did when he claimed that he just knew the movie theater shooter in Colorado had to be on the "autism scale." He also made sure his audience knew that his son has Aspergers, so he knew what he was talking about.
They are both using their status as parents of autistic people to make bigoted statements more convincing and more palatable.
It's hard for me to say how angry this makes me or how morally wrong or harmful to autistic people I think it is. When parents teach people to fear their own kids, they are stealing opportunities from them.
Heather has gotten 117 replies so far, a few calling her out for her bigotry, many agreeing. She has inspired a copycat thread about Joe Biden:
As we know, Aspies often make clueless and inappropriate comments and bad jokes. They tend to blurt out exactly what they think without considering (or being aware of) how it will come across. Joe is well known for these. As much if not more so than Romney and his opinion of cookies. Do we all remember Joe's "articulate and clean" comment about Obama? Here is a list of "Bidenisms."