(LifeSiteNews) — This will make Texans snort, but I had no idea Governor Greg Abbott was a wheelchair user until Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett mocked him for it.
“We in these hot a** Texas streets, honey,” she drawled. “You all know we got Governor Hot Wheels down there, come on now. And the only thing hot about him is that he is a hot a** mess, honey.”
You’d never know from her choice of diction and delivery that Crockett went to St. Louis private schools (tuition currently $25,460 – $34,910/a) and then a fancy-pants private college in Memphis before going to law school in Houston, but she sure done did, honey. And you’d also be surprised to learn she was speaking for an organization called Human Rights Campaign if the name hadn’t been emblazoned on the screen behind her.
My working life involves more words than images, so I couldn’t recall what Governor Abbott looked like until I searched for his photo on LifeSiteNews. Of course, I remembered that he’s pro-life, pro-family, and pro-freedom-from-facemasks. What someone does and what he or she stands for means so much more than what he or she looks like. But now that I know that Governor Abbott has needed wheelchairs since an oak tree fell on him over 40 years ago, I have more respect for him than ever.
I also have a lot of respect for his wife. Greg and Cecilia Abbott were married in 1981, when they were in their early 20s. Greg was crushed by that tree three years later; it smashed some vertebrae, broke some ribs, damaged some organs and, crucially, hurt his spinal cord. The surgeons reinforced his spine with steel rods, but he was paralyzed from the waist down – which has complications of its own. Cecilia, a devout Catholic, has stuck by him ever since. After 16 years of marriage, they adopted a daughter.
I have an inkling of what the Abbotts’ home life has been like because I’m married to man who is all but paralyzed from the waist down. It wasn’t an accident; it was cancer – benign, which doesn’t mean harmless. It just means he’s not going to die of it. He can even stand a little, with support, and make it down our staircase to his outdoor wheelchair by gripping the handrails. When he comes home from work, he can just manage to get back up the stairs and into his indoor wheelchair.
This is his only exercise, and he terribly misses cooking and pottering about. Becoming the governor of Texas was never on his bucket list, so I’m just proud he got a job in this condition and goes to work, day in, day out. Every time he collapses into his chair, indoor or out, it’s a victory. Being a wheelchair user doesn’t lessen his dignity as a human being; it increases it. Someone please tell Congresswoman Big Mouth.
Crockett has refused to apologize for mocking Abbott’s disability. Instead, she has insulted our collective intelligence by claiming she was referring to “the planes, trains, and automobiles he used to transfer migrants into communities led by Black mayors, deliberately stoking tension and fear among the most vulnerable.” I am not sure who she meant by “the most vulnerable”; true to the contemporary Democratic Party, she’s an abortion activist, getting a solid F from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, so she didn’t literally mean the most vulnerable people in Washington, D.C., New York, and Chicago, i.e. the unborn.
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But I don’t want to forget the vulnerability of disabled people. That there are search-and-destroy missions against disabled unborn babies we already know, and we have long reported attempts to make killing disabled children, teens and adults legal, too. However, during the COVID “emergency,” disabled people (especially with Down syndrome) were more likely to be given Do-Not-Resuscitate (DNR) orders than the able-bodied.
Fear and hatred of disabilities feature in our contemporary pop culture, too. Films like Gattica and Me Before You suggest that death is preferable to living in a wheelchair. And there must be something seriously wrong in a society where a congresswoman mocks a man’s paralysis, and her audience laughs and cheers.
Governor Abbott says the problem is the Democratic Party. Yesterday he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that it has “no vision, no policy” and “nothing to sell but hate.”
“And Americans are not buying it,” he added. “It’s one reason why Texas is going to remain red and why Republicans are going to continue to win elections across the country. The bottom line is that Republican states like Texas are leading the way. And with comments like this by the Democrats, we will just leave them in the dust in future elections.”
Randy Weber, a Republican congressman from Texas, has said he plans to file a resolution to officially censure Crockett for her nasty remarks. I hope he succeeds. It should be underscored, from both sides of the aisle and throughout the world, that it is not clever or funny to mock people for using wheelchairs.
Another good thing can come out of Crockett’s “hot a** mess”: a conversation about how society can better treat its members in wheelchairs. My husband’s pet peeve is straphangers on the bus who dangle their bags in his face. Another able-bodied habit that adds to his burden is using a cellphone while walking. It’s hard for him to drive his chair on crowded sidewalks when so many people don’t look where they’re going. My own pet peeve is able-bodied people sitting in the wheelchair section of trains or – even worse – filling it with their suitcases. When this happens, I go out of my mind. I’ve begun to call this Carer’s Rage. I wonder how Cecilia Abbott handles it?
Unkind people might say that Cecilia Abbott doesn’t have to handle it because, as well as she being the first lady of Texas, her husband won significant financial damages for his crippling injuries. However, here’s what Greg Abbott had to say in 2013 about that:
Money doesn’t heal anything. Money doesn’t allow me to walk. It doesn’t allow me to dance with my wife. It doesn’t allow me to pick up my daughter. It doesn’t allow me to walk my daughter down the aisle when she gets married. If you could name the person I could write the check to, I’d send all this money right back if I could walk again.
Amen to that. I thank God I danced with my husband when we still had the chance – his 15th anniversary of becoming a Catholic. Which reminds me, if you can still walk, why not thank God for it right now? It’s something I’ll never take for granted again.
