There are a lot of things deeply wrong with the vision of the world Mitt Romney laid out for a group of fundraisers in May in remarks recorded on video released by Mother Jones. There’s the idea that the very poor are sponging off the labor of the very rich. The misplaced idea that people who receive any form of government assistance inevitably vote for Democrats. But one of the things that stuck with me, as it always does, is that everyone receiving government assistance, whether in the form of tax credits, Supplemental Security Income, or help from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program likes it, that help from the government is something people develop a taste for and want to continue consuming. It’s a narrative that doesn’t allow for the idea that needing help actually becomes a substantial spur to success for a lot of people. I’m sure these five people—and many others—might be able to enlighten Romney about the impact of getting help from the federal government on their lives, and what they do and don’t think they’re entitled to.

1. Natalie Hawkins, mother to Olympic gold medal gymnast Gabby Douglas: Hawkins is on long-term disability, something that doesn’t seem to have prevented her from helping raise an Olympic gymnast. Shockingly, I’m pretty sure she doesn’t enjoy having had to declare bankruptcy, or the fact that her daughter’s endorsement earnings after her Olympic all-around gold medal will probably be the thing that can lift her out of it.

2. Tobey Maguire: The actor told Barbara Walters in 2002 that “Me and my Mom would go into a grocery store and get groceries and pay for them with food stamps, and I would run out of the store embarrassed.” That doesn’t really sound to me like someone who believes “that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them.”

3. Oprah Winfrey: Winfrey’s mother, Vernita Lee, sometimes relied on welfare to supplement her income during Winfrey’s childhood—in fact, she gave up Winfrey’s half sister, Patricia Lee, for adoption because she was afraid the burden of raising another child would make it impossible for her to get off the welfare rolls. The experience doesn’t appear to have bred in Winfrey a love of government assistance. During the debate over welfare reform, Winfrey declared she wanted to “destroy the welfare mentality,” and gave $6 million for a program run through the Jane Addams Hull House Association to help Chicago families move off the welfare rolls.

4. Cecil Fielder: While Fielder worked his way up to the big leagues, his family couldn’t make ends meet on minor-league paychecks. His wife Stacey got the family food stamps to cover the gaps. Fielder finally made it in the bigs, and his son followed him to a Major League career. Taking some public assistance doesn’t appear to have given the family a multi-generational taste for the culture of dependency.

5. Whoopi Goldberg: Before she was an actress, she sometimes relied on public assistance—People reported that she worked however she could while trying to make it as an actress, including a stint as a morgue beautician. That doesn’t sound like someone who would have preferred to be supported by the government to winning an EGOT.

With the Paralympic games on in London, disability is on the world stage, and in a positive framing, for once. Instead of the usual disability-as-tragedy narrative, we’re seeing skilled athletes at the top of their game competing against each other in a range of events, from equestrian (my favourite!) to goalball, a sport designed for blind and low-vision athletes. Inevitably, with increased visibility comes increased discussion and awareness, which is in resulting in some positives, and some negatives, but a conversation that is fascinating overall; the disability community itself is a bit split when it comes to reception of the Paralympics, for example.

The origins of the games lie in the Stoke Mandeville Games of 1948, which ran alongside the Olympic Games. Their organiser, Ludwig Guttmann, was a neurologist who worked with disabled veterans. In the wake of the Second World War, large numbers of men were occupying military hospitals and convalescence centres with spinal cord injuries, amputations, head injuries, and other disabilities acquired in battle. Patients injured in bombings and other events were also changing the landscape of disability in Britain.

Guttman started engaging them in sports as a form of therapy to ‘rescue these men, women and children from the scrapheap.’ His argument, that people with disabilities were often mired in long-term care facilities with little social or medical support, still holds true today. Patients were rotting in their beds then and they still are; so he used sports therapy to get them moving, and he developed the games to showcase the diversity within the disability community, and illustrate that people with disabilities weren’t inherently useless or less capable than the nondisabled community.  Read more

There are a lot of terrific online sitcoms and dramas coming online every day, which is a blessing. But it can be hard to hunt down the best of that content across all the platforms where it lives. So every Wednesday, I’ll bring you a roundup of the best of online television that I’m watching in a given week. And if you have recommendations for shows I should be watching, let me know.

1. Husbands: Season 2 of the marriage equality sitcom from Brad Bell and Jane Espenson begins today as our newlyweds, baseball player Brady and unemployed actor Cheeks start navigating what boundaries look like in married life. And if you need a refresher, check out my behind-the-scenes look at the series and the challenges and opportunities of making television for the internet.

2. My Gimpy Life: There are a lot of funny, unsentimental comedies about people with disabilities in the pipeline, including The Sessions, the Oscar-bait movie starring John Hawks as a polio-stricken man who sets out to lose his virginity in his thirties and FX’s upcoming sitcom Legit, which follows the misadventures of three men, one of whom uses a wheelchair. Actress Teal Sherer beat them both to the punch with this funny, spiky series that’s as much about how Hollywood works as it is about navigating life while using a wheelchair:

3. H+: Bryan Singer returns to some of the themes he explored in his X-Men movies in H+, a series about a world where humans have adopted computer implants in their brains—but the man who invented the technology has vanished and whistleblowers are warning of ominous consequences. The show looks terrific, and I think has a chance to be one of the first great online dramas:

4. Lauren: Lots of online television shows are distinguishing themselves from network fare by bluntly confronting social issues. Lauren, one of a number of series from the WIGS channel, which focuses on female characters, is taking on rape and the chain of command in the military:

Oscar Pistorius, a South African quarter-miler who became the first athlete with a disability to qualify for the Olympic Games this year, was born with a rare condition that caused the amputation of both legs below the knee. Pistorius runs on “blades,” and though there is no evidence that the blades provide Pistorius with any competitive advantage over his fellow runners, his participation has sparked a needless controversy from writers and analysts like CBS Sports’ Gregg Doyel, who thinks the precedent set by Pistorius’ participation could “ruin the Olympics.”

The nut of Doyel’s argument is that while Pistorius’ story is “a great one,” it isn’t fair for him to run against “able-bodied” athletes because at some hypothetical point in the future, a disabled runner using prosthetic blades will have an unfair advantage over athletes with legs. That, Doyel says, is a dangerous precedent:

But Pistorius represents so much more than one man, one country, even one Olympiad. He represents every amputee from this day forward, and once he runs in the 2012 Games, the precedent will have been set. And it’s not a good one.

The small problem with Doyel’s argument is that it depends solely on a hypothetical, one the International Olympic Committee is capable of dealing with. If technology becomes an artificial advantage, it is an easy problem to address, the same way the IOC bans performance-enhancing drugs and dealt with the swimming suit controversy from the 2008 Beijing Games. And Doyel either isn’t aware of or doesn’t mention the story of George Eyser, a gymnast whose six medals at the 1904 Olympics remain the only ever won by an athlete with an artificial leg. Far from being ruined, the Olympics continued to grow and prosper for the next 108 years.

The larger problem, though, is that Doyel and others that share his view have seemingly lost a perspective of what the Olympic Games are for, something that is easy to do in a country that regularly finishes at the top of the medal count and where sports, for better or worse, are played solely to win. But here, lest Doyel or anyone else forget, is the Olympic mission:

The purpose of the Olympic Movement is to:
– link sport with culture and education;
– promote the practice of sport and the joy found in effort;
– help to build a better world through sport practised in a spirit of peace, excellence, friendship and respect.

This mission is what led the IOC to negotiate the addition of first Saudi Arabian women in Olympic history to the kingdom’s team even though they didn’t qualify. It is what leads athletes across the globe to chase the Olympic dream even if they have no chance of challenging better athletes for a gold medal. It is what brought Jesse Owens to the Third Reich, Pyambu Tuul to Barcelona, a united Korea to Sydney, and a man with no legs to London.

The Olympics are as much about the stories of overcoming adversity and challenging global and personal barriers as they are about champions and their medals. Oscar Pistorius won’t ruin that. Attitudes like Doyel’s will.

I loved The Sessions (then titled The Surrogate) when I saw it at Sundance, and I wish the trailer captured a little bit more of the movie’s tart humor. What’s unusual about The Sessions, which is based on an article by the late Mark O’Brien, isn’t just that it deals with the sexual lives of disabled people, an almost untouchable subject in modern popular culture, but that it’s a movie that is directly about the disparate experiences of people with disabilities without encouraging the audience to pity the main character:

Mark is funny, in the movie. He’s smart. He’s eloquent. He faces something he’s anxious about—losing his virginity—directly and with a lot of self-awareness. He’s not a saint, which is a relief. Mark gets to make mistakes and cross boundaries, but he also takes responsibility for those errors and grows from them. In other words, he’s a specific person, rather than a stand-in for a set of traits or the means by which able-bodied people learn tolerance and get to be awed by Mark’s perseverance and hope.

I think we need a lot more of this in pop culture. People with disabilities have different experiences of the world than able-bodied people do, in a whole range of areas. Folks with disabilities have higher unemployment rates than able-bodied people, and a lack of adaptive technologies can make it harder for them to access educational opportunities and appropriate housing. But the fact that our society and political system have been slow to accomodate disabled people, and that disabled people live involve different challenges and frustrations, doesn’t mean that people with disabilities are pitiable or saintly, or that their experiences are wholly different from able-bodied people’s. Mark’s intimacy issues and fear that he’s unlovable may spring from different wells than your standard romantic comedy heroine’s, for example, but the movie is a variation on a conventional romantic comedy structure. He is definitely not your Judd Apatow-style schlub—he’s an accomplished poet, as O’Brien was in real life—but his conversations with his priest (a very funny William H. Macy) and his caregiver (Moon Bloodgood) are funny in some of the same frank ways. It’s depressing to watch pop culture, and people more broadly, get caught up in disabilities such that they fail to see the people, and the characters, who have disabilities but are hardly the sum of them.