Politics
Hunter Woodhall and other Paralympic athletes aren’t competing to impress you
UPDATE(Sept. 6, 2024, 6:10 p.m. ET):On Friday, Hunter Woodhall won gold in the 400-meter T62 event at the Paralympics. On Monday, he finished 6th in the men’s 100-meter T64 final.
With the athletes proceeding down Paris’ Champs-Élysées to Place de la Concorde, the cobblestoned thoroughfare temporarily topped with asphalt to increase accessibility, the 2024 Paralympics kicked off in a spectacular fashion. The games for disabled athletes has also had some high profile cheerleaders. All-time Olympic greats Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky encouraged fans to tune inand Snoop Dogg, fresh off his run as a hype man for the Olympics in Paris, cut an ad for the Paralympics Games.
One hopes this unprecedented media attention helps sports featuring disabled athletes become more mainstream.
Visibility will be higher than it’s ever been. The International Paralympic Committee announced that more than 225 media rights holders, including broadcasters, streamers, digital, social and audio platforms, will cover the Games.
One hopes this unprecedented media attention helps sports featuring disabled athletes become more mainstream. Indeed, some of the Olympic Games coverage served as a preview for the Paralympic Games when American long jumper Tara Davis Woodhall, who’d just won the gold medal, ran to the stands and jumped into the arms of her husband, Hunter Woodhall, a sprinter who has three medals from the Paralympics in Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro.
Hunter Woodhall, 25, who was born with fibular hemimelia and is a double amputee, competed in the first round of the men’s 100-meter T64 Sunday and will run in the final for the event Monday. He’s scheduled to run in the 400-meter T62 race Friday. (T61-T64 events are for athletes “competing with prosthesis affected by limb deficiency and leg length difference,” according to World Para Athletics.)
“I’m feeling really good, mentally and physically,” Woodhall told NBC News. “Watching Tara in Paris was a really great visualization. So I’m prepared.”
Unfortunately, as any sports fan knows, the more popular a sport becomes, the more trash opinions abound. As disabled athletes become more visible, nondisabled people who are watching must resist the impulse to chalk up the performances as more inspiring than those from other athletes.
The late disability rights advocate Stella Young articulated the trouble with so-called “inspiration porn” in an April 2014 Ted Talk. She showed images of people with disabilities playing sports alongside unhelpful captions such as “The only disability is a bad attitude;” “Your excuse is invalid” or “Before you quit, try.”
If that’s the reason people are watching the Paralympics, it would be better if they watched something else.
Young used the word “porn” intentionally because she said that images of disabled people, like pornography, can be used to objectify one group of people for the pleasure of another group of people.
“The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you,” she said, “so that we can look at them and think, ‘Well, however bad my life is, it could be worse. I could be that person.’”
If that’s the reason people are watching the Paralympics, it would be better if they watched something else. Watching the games for inspiration, and not for the enjoyment that comes with watching athletes compete, turns the athletes and the Games into a medium to make nondisabled people feel better about themselves. Also, simply deeming paralympians “inspiring” diminishes their real achievements. Like every other athlete, they have put in years of work to reach this stage in their career. Reducing them to symbols of inspiration is condescending and patronizing.
The coverage of disabled athletes and the way that viewers respond to that coverage needs to match what happens when nondisabled athletes are playing. We don’t watch the U.S. Women’s National Team in soccer and say how inspiring it is that women can play soccer; we watch because the American women are good and play soccer better than the guys. The popularity of women’s basketball is exploding, in part, because people see Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese as outstanding basketball players and not as symbols of what girls can accomplish if they don’t give up.
The Paralympics offers a major opportunity for disabled athletes. Broadcasting the games is not an act of charity. It’s a recognition that the best athletes in the world competing against one another makes for compelling television.
Disabled athletes aren’t competing to impress or inspire you. They’re competing for the gold.
Eric Garcia is the senior Washington correspondent and bureau chief for The Independent. He is the author of “We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation.”
‘We are winning elections’: Bernie Sanders on Democrats’ progressive wing
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Politics
Trump wants the Postal Service to radically overhaul mail voting. But ballots are already going out.
President Donald Trump’s controversial demands for the Postal Service to overhaul and monitor millions of mail ballots hit another snag on Friday, when North Carolina became the first state in the nation to start sending out ballots for the November election.
In March, Trump signed the initial executive order, which aimed to crack down on mail-in voting — which he regularly alleges without evidence is a vector for widespread voter fraud — and assert an unprecedented amount of federal control over the upcoming elections.
Under this order and the subsequent rule drafted by the U.S. Postal Service, the USPS would refuse to deliver ballots to states that failed to provide lists of eligible mail voters or did not adhere to an approved envelope design style.
Since then, the order has faced legal challenges, and it remains paused by a federal judge’s orders. But the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to allow the new rule to proceed — something current and former election officials from both parties say would be both a legal nightmare that oversteps the federal government’s traditional role in elections and a logistical one that is happening far too close to the November election to implement even if they agreed with it.
“Why the hell are you rocking the boat this late in the game?” said Stephen Richer, a former Republican recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, who has clashed with Trump allies for defending the security of the 2020 election.
Still, election officials are trying to project a sense of normalcy for voters, particularly in North Carolina, which serves as a test of whether established local election systems can operate normally amid intensifying federal scrutiny.
“I want to emphasize this point because there has been a lot of outside noise: Our county workers are ready,” Sam Hayes, a longtime Republican lawyer in the state and now executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said in a Thursday afternoon press conference.
He added, “All we can do is what we’re doing. … It is business as usual as far as I’m concerned.”
Despite the legal challenges, the Trump administration has continued to press the courts to let it proceed. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to lift an order from a Massachusetts judge which temporarily prevents the USPS from enforcing their rule. It is the second time the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to step in, after winning an earlier victory in which the high court dismissed an earlier hold on the rule as premature.
“The uncertainty is coming from a single activist judge who continues to try and obstruct President Trump from implementing commonsense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and ensure only Americans vote in American elections,” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement. “These safeguards for mail ballots were proposed months ago giving election officials ample time to prepare for the 2026 election.”
The USPS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Election officials said that if the rule goes into effect this close to November, it would cause chaos and place added strain on the USPS and election officials. And an anonymous federal whistleblower said in a report circulated earlier this week by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) that the USPS was moving forward in a “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed process” to try to implement the new system ahead of the midterms.
In the coming weeks, states across the country will follow North Carolina’s lead. Nine other states will begin mailing ballots in the next two weeks, according to a tracker from the National Conference of State Legislatures — with the biggest day for mailing coming 45 days before the election in mid-September.
“It would be so outrageous to try to let this go into effect. It’s hard to even imagine,” said Ben Hovland, a senior fellow for democracy at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress and former Democratic commissioner with the Election Assistance Commission who was fired by Trump in July.
He added, “It would be a break-glass moment for our democracy.”
The rule would require meticulous changes to ballot handling and tracking practices that Hovland said are impossible to implement before Election Day in about two months, effectively disenfranchising millions of voters.
“Ballots are printed. Envelopes are printed. You can go on and on with all the practical reasons that show that implementing something like this at this time is not feasible,” he said.
Richer said he doubted the new rules would bring about more security. Even if the USPS received lists from the states, according to the postal service’s final rule, it would not do any additional vetting of the list, Richer said.
“It’s just that the mail ballots have to be on that list, and I don’t see what added value for election integrity that does,” he said.
He added, “It creates a lot of administrative burden, and I think it creates a lot more opportunity for error.”
While a decision looms in the courts, election officials and experts cast doubt on the likelihood of the rules going into effect before November. A more pressing issue, they said, is the confusion and uncertainty surrounding mail-in ballots, which could subvert and change the behaviors of voters.
“It makes things seem messy or difficult, and it can dissuade people from participating or coming out to vote,” Hovland said. “It certainly also helps establish a pretext to make bad faith claims about election results.”
Hovland said that while none of these claims of voter fraud are backed up with facts, they could cause Americans to lose faith in the voting process.
Still, some current officials contended they were well-prepared for whatever happens — and that they’d be able to communicate effectively with voters who have become increasingly buffeted by dramatic rhetoric about the once-unmentioned nuts and bolts of actually running an election.
“There’s always a lot of noise around elections, that’s not going to change, and it can be hard to differentiate that from what’s actually going on on the ground,” said Jason Tyson, director of external affairs for the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
As Election Day approaches, Tyson and election officials said they urge voters to check their registration status and make a plan to vote.
He added, “I think we’ve got a really well-trained, solid staff who are ready, and who have gone through all of the checks and balances and points of contact that we need to do to get to where we are.”
Missouri’s Supreme Court suspended a congressional map that state Republicans drew last year that would have netted the GOP an additional House seat, likely keeping the seat in Democratic hands this November.
The court ruled unanimously on Thursday that a referendum petition organized by Democrats to put the new congressional maps to a vote was incorrectly deemed insufficient by Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, and ordered that the gerrymandered map be put to a vote in the fall.
Voters will ultimately decide the fate of the new lines in November. But in the meantime, it cannot be in place for the midterms, meaning Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s original Kansas City-based district will likely stay in Democrats’ hands this fall.
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