Being Heumann

But the biggest thing he did was to get the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, passed. The Affordable Care Act allowed disabled people, who were getting denied health insurance because of preexisting conditions, to get insurance; it also made health insurance more affordable; and expanded Medicaid

Disability is a natural aspect of the human condition. As people live longer, as we fight more wars, as medical care continues to improve—more and more people who might have died in an earlier era will live. Perhaps with a disability. We should accept it. Plan for it. Build our society around it.

As disabled women, we didn’t have help from the women’s movement. We were always pushing to have our issues considered and supported by the women’s movement, but we were largely ignored.

We were basically on our own.

We could lead a hundred and fifty people to take over the Federal Building in San Francisco and change the laws for disabled people.

But we were not in charge.

People called me pushy.

People never called Ed pushy.

The truth was, I didn’t push myself forward in the same way Ed did. Ed did it naturally. He presumed things would open up, that he would be welcomed. He presumed privilege. For me, it was something I had to work on. I never felt like I could presume acceptance of my ideas, of myself. I found myself being deferential to men, even when I didn’t mean to be.

SECTION 504 HAD REDEFINED DISABILITY. Instead of looking at disability as a medical issue, it had made disability a question of civil—and human—rights. This was the difference my friends from abroad were talking about.

What a pervasive influence silence and avoidance have had on my life.

Why wasn’t I in school?

Silence.

Why aren’t we allowed on buses?

Silence.

Why can’t disabled people teach?

Silence.

Where are all the Jews going?

Piercing silence.

I refuse to give in to the pressure of the silence.

“I’m going to miss them,” said a Federal Building guard; he had started learning sign language and hoped one day to become a sign language interpreter. “They were real nice people.”

Afterward, Evan and his cameraman broke White House protocol by following Califano out of the room to ask questions. Califano’s guards blocked Evan from following Califano into the elevator, but then the elevator car accidentally returned to where Evan was standing and the door opened. Pushing the microphone into Califano’s face while his cameraman filmed, Evan asked Califano a series of questions through the door.

The Sunday morning after our candlelight vigil in front of Califano’s house, we picketed the front of President Carter’s church, First Baptist.

He and Mrs. Carter saw us as they were going into the service, but afterward, he slipped out the back.

A reporter picked up on it. “Inside, President Carter taught his Bible class before hearing a sermon in which the pastor said, ‘We can’t dwell in comfort with poverty all around us.’”

In our next press release we wrote that we remained “stymied by the administration’s new backdoor policy.”