Cure Autism Now Celebrates the Senate HELP Committee Passage of the Combating Autism Act of 2006


On Wednesday, July 19, the 20 members of the Senate HELP Committee unanimously voted to send the Combating Autism Act of 2006 (S.843) to the full Senate for approval. This represents a tremendous victory for the entire autism community, including the many organizations that formed a coalition to advance this legislation. We anticipate the bill will pass the Senate by a "unanimous consent" vote prior to the summer recess, which begins August 4.

With the leadership of our original sponsor, Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) and his staff, and the assembly and involvement of the autism community consensus group, the CAA of 2006 has emerged as a historic $1 billion single-disease authorization bill for autism that serves as an acknowledgment by the United States Senate that autism is a national public health crisis.

The Combating Autism Act of 2006 was originally drafted by Cure Autism Now's Government Relations representative and Chapter Leader Stuart Spielman, and much of the legislative strategy was planned and implemented by CAN's lobbying team. The CAA of 2006 began as a reauthorization of the autism section in the Children's Health Act of 2000, which was also introduced by CAN and became the first landmark piece of autism legislation.

Cure Autism Now would like to thank all members of the HELP Committee for their unprecedented commitment to fulfill the promise of meaningful research, timely intervention and an accelerated path to a cure for autism. In addition to our champion Senator Santorum, our gratitude goes to HELP Committee Chairman Michael Enzi (R-WY) and Ranking Member Edward Kennedy (D-MA), sponsor Christopher Dodd (D-CT), Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and their tireless staffs for their tremendous effort in crafting the Combating Autism Act of 2006 .

Once the bill passes the Senate, our attention will shift to the House of Representatives where we have 136 co-sponsors to date. Visit www. combatautism.org to find out if your Congressman is a co-sponsor. If not, please contact them while they are in district for the August recess and ask them to co-sponsor the Combating Autism Act of 2006 (H.R. 2421).    

Cure Autism Now thanks the many autism organizations in the community that have actively participated in these efforts and we thank our families and friends who have reached out to their legislators to help us combat autism.

This represents a tremendous victory for the entire autism community

I think they mis-typed this line, they missed out "tremendous victory against the entire"

1 - I would advise that nobody tax evades - this is a rather stupid idea
2 - We need to take action NOW, not after it's already passed.

Don't waste your time. People only listen when you are directly on their doorstep. Petitioning won't do anything. So this is what we do. Let the law pass. Watch Bush sign it, then flood all of the research centers in america with petitions.

If the bill does pass, this might be a good course of action, but I don't see why we shouldn't try to prevent the bill from passing in the first place.

I actually think it's a good idea to try to direct the research once the money gets to the research stations.  But, that is still a few steps away at this point, and there are strong possibilities that the money will arrive with precise instructions on how it should be used.  We don't have a bill yet, so now is the time to try to shape the bill.

Sometimes voices are heard.  It's a little too early to be cynical.  Your experience may be all negative, but mine isn't.  Yes, it is about how to play the game.  I'm part of the NT world; trust me that I have some clue how to play it.  What I don't have is the time to do it myself.  But, there are others here who might have that time.  I CAN try to help someone like that get heard.  A few tips might go a long way.

Ok then Mr. Smith, you go along and try to make your difference. Once this whole thing fails, I get to laugh my a** off and we can go for the research centers.

This isn't my issue.  It's yours.  I think a lot less cynicism and a lot more effort would get you all a lot closer to the results you want.  You can choose to throw jabs from outside of the process, or you can try to make an effort to get in it, and to learn how to be successful.  It's a choice.

Learn how to be successful? Yeah, I'm sure you will all be very proud of your success after the billion goes to research and your efforts turn out to be fruitless. There are better fights to pick, ones that you can win. But a ragtag bunch of aspies isn't going to convince anyone to turn their vote.

CAN has a much better image than we do. We're supposed to be retarded or something. Morals aside, senators don't want to hook up with us. Maybe if we grouped marched to the capital a point would be made, but we're too small in numbers.

subatai, why are you here? I mean, you seem very anti-Aspie, almost to the point where I'd assume you're NT. Perhaps if you want to be negative about helping an important cause, perhaps you should find somewhere else to do it.

I'm sure that all politicians are aware that diagnosed autistics, however anti-cure we might be, only make up at most 1% of the population, compared with a much larger minority of NT or closet aspie family members who are likely to support curebie organizations, and the vast majority of voters are NTs with no significant relationship to any autistic person, who just believe whatever the TV newsreader tells them about autism. AS VOTERS AUTISTICS COUNT FOR NOTHING. I'll bet most pollies assume that we are incapable of voting. I doubt that anything that we say to a politician will make any difference, unless there is a real threat that supporting curebie groups will backfire on the pollie by giving him bad publicity rather than "brownie points".

The group to work on, to change opinions, is the third group that I mentioned, the vast NT majority who know nothing much about autism. If we can manipulate the media to present a positive image of autism/AS, then we could swing public opinion our way, and then, and only then, will the politicians listen to us.

I am writing to you about the "Combating Autism Act" (H.R. 2421), because my parents, my husband and myself all find ourselves on the autism spectrum.  As persons with this neurological difference, we work, study, and teach.  We enjoy our lives, not only inspite of -more often, because of- our social and processing differences.  

I am thankful that our government wants to help autistics.  I do not feel that the large Autism organizations are in fact concerned with helping autistics.  With names like "Cure Autism Now" or "Defeat Autism Now", they express more of a desire to prevent the existence of more people like us.
Even Autism Speaks has the following goals more connected with cure and with considering autism a "health crisis" than with understanding and helping autistic persons:
http://www. autismspeaks.org/goals.php
http://www. autismspeaks.org/science.php
Videos are made ("Autism Every Day" for example) where parents say they wish their child dead or have wished to kill their autistic child, in front of the child!  This is not acceptable.  If such attitudes are advertised to be normal, and our lives are judged to be less worthwhile than other lives, it is no wonder several parents have murdered their autistic children in recent times.

Many autistic people, as well as many non-autistic parents of autistic children and adults, feel that our way of being is valid and that we do not need to be Cured.  It is known that an autistic person may undergo various types of therapy, may learn to communicate, may learn to interact socially... but deep down they will still be autistic.  This is not a tragedy, it's a way -our way- of being human.

Rather than concentrating on Cure, I believe a more effective use of funds would be to help actual autistic people, perhaps in some of these ways:
1) services to enable autistic adults (even those considered low-functioning) to live independently instead of in a dehumanizing institutional life.
2) services to facilitate learning of work skills for autistic teens and adults, and job-placement.
3) services to allow families new to autism to interact with autistic teens and adults, to educate parents in ways of understanding their child and about the many future possibilities for their child, and also to allow children to see that adults like them exist, so they can have positive autistic role-models.
4) services needed at home and in schools to help autistic children learn to communicate in a way that works for them.
5) These are just a few ideas.  There should be input from actual autistic people about the services that are needed and about what constitutes "help".  The organization called "Autism Speaks" does not in fact speak for autistics, as they have very few autistic members and therefore cannot understand what it is like to be the people they claim to speak for.

I am seriously concerned about the moral implications of research that attempts to find a prenatal test for identifying autistics. Based on what has happened with the test for Down Syndrome, it is probable that people would use the results of such a test to then abort autistic babies.

If you are interested in knowing what actual autistics think about these issues and more, you could visit some or all of the following organizations:
http://www.autistics.org/ (especially http://www.autistics.org/library/ )
http://www.neurodiversity.com/
http://aspiesforfreedom.org/
   (especially http://aspiesforfreedom.org/wiki/ and http://www.autismprenataltest.com/ )
http://thiswayoflife.org/
   (especially http://thiswayoflife.org/murder.html and http://thiswayoflife.org/quality.html )
http://www.gettingthetruthout.org/
   (on this last one you have to read the whole thing, or you will get the wrong idea.  if you do take the time to read it, you will be amazed.)

Thank you in advance for considering our viewpoint on matters that concern us.

Sorry guys, it's too late for this bill.  

I seriously doubt that we would be able to find enough autistics in one place to have one large offline group. And of course, being spread out allows us to influence things on a wider scale.

People motivate each other; 5 people may go do some activism together even if none would have done anything themselves.