Sunday, October 21, 2007

National Autism Symposium Script Released

The Script for the Harper Government's National Autism Symposium Stage Production has now been released. The auditions for parts in this staged production are closed (never having been open) . The actors pre-selected by the CIHR will test their acting skills by pretending that they are representative of provincial autism communities, whose organizations were not actually consulted and did not pick their own delegates. Actors must be able to portray real delegates earnestly engaged in discussion of autism issues. The audience will see these skilled actors pretend to arrive at the following conclusions in the final scene:

1) There is no actual increase in autism, it is a figment of our collective consciousness. The authors of one Montreal study say so.

2) There is no consensus about autism treatments, contrary to the silly beliefs of the state agencies in New York, California, Maine, the US Surgeon General, the dozens of Ph.D's and MD's who form the advisory board of the Association for Science in Autism Treatment, the researchers who contributed to the recent Cambridge University research sponsored report by Research Autism which ranked autism interventions, the hundreds of thousands of parents across North America seeking ABA services of their autistic children, and the authors of hundreds of research studies showing gains for children who received ABA.

All of these sources will be revealed in the National Autism Symposium Stage Production as having foolishly leaped to the conclusion that ABA is the treatment of choice for autism and should not be accepted as evidence of a consensus about autism treatments.

These are some elements of the script which will be followed at the Stephen Harper National Autism Symposium Stage Production scheduled to be performed November 8 and 9. The full script can be found in the Harper Government Response to the Report of the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, Pay Now or Pay Later - Autism Families in Crisis.

Regretfully, members of organizations composed of actual Autism Families in Crisis will be unable to view the Autism Symposium Stage Production. After all this is Canada, not the US, where democracy and law require open public performances at events of importance and where actors must audition for their parts and be democratically selected by the communities they pretend to represent. And after all someone might disrupt the performance, and violate the sensitivities and human rights of the actors, by shouting out such obscenities as "Applied Behavior Analysis", "ABA" or "Medicare".

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