David Hoggard posted a piece on his blog about his 16 year old daughter’s experience at the National Conference for Community and Justice Anytown residential summer program at Blowing Rock.  Since my oldest is 15 I thought I should check it out and see if it’s something of promise for him.  When I checked the Anytown website I came across this paragraph:

With a diverse group of about 70 delegates, 13 peer counselors, 12
adult advisors and 3 directors spend a week at the Blowing Rock
Conference Center in Blowing Rock, NC exploring issues such as racism,
homophobia, interfaith respect, prejudice and discrimination, ableism,
culture and sexism. (Emphasis mine).

I’d thought I’d heard of all the "isms" but "ableism" was a new one to me.  So I Googled the term and found this Wikipedia page which offered this explanation:

Ableism is a neologism of American coinage, since about 1981. It is used to describe inherent discrimination against people with disabilities in favor of people who are not disabled. An ableist
society is said to be one that treats non-disabled individuals as the
standard of ‘normal living’, which results in public and private places
and services, education, and social work that are built to serve
‘standard’ people, thereby inherently excluding those with various
disabilities.

Though the proper formation from the nominal stem would be abilitism (compare ageism, a 1969 neologism, the correct Latinate form of which would be aetatism), the term ableism is the term in use.

The presumption that everyone is non-disabled is said to be
effectively discriminatory in itself, creating built environments which
are inaccessible to disabled people. Advocates of the term argue that ableism is analogous to racism and sexism
in that it is a system by which mainstream society denigrates,
devalues, and thus oppresses those with disabilities, while privileging
those without disabilities.

Uh, doesn’t every group of people have what could be termed as the "average" or "norm"?  Without a "norm" we’d have no cause to recognize the exceptional or the disabled.  I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do whatever we can to accomodate the disabled, but to say that recognizing non-disabled as a society’s norm strikes me as absurd.  I also take umbrage with the first sentence of that last paragraph.  Just because a society recognizes the non-disabled as standard doesn’t mean that society identifies everybody as non-disabled, rather the society is merely recognizing that the vast majority of its members are non-disabled. 

The article goes on to discern between societies that are inclusive of the disabled versus societies that are isolationist and paternalistic towards the disabled.  That part I buy, but to say that a society is inherently  discriminatory towards the disabled simply because it recognizes the non-disabled as the norm strikes me as plain wrong.  Maybe I’m reading it wrong, but if I’m not then I think they need to consider a philosophical readjustment.