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HomeMy WebLinkAbout10-13-25 Correspondence - Disability Rights Montana - I'll see you in court...From:Disability Rights Montana - Life Beyond Compliance To:Bozeman Public Comment Subject:[EXTERNAL]I"ll see you in court... Date:Monday, October 13, 2025 7:02:27 AM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe. Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Every paid subscription supports Disability Rights Montana’s work across Montana. Federal funding is nowhere near sufficient to meet the advocacy and culture change work that is needed. You can help fund the future you want to see! I'll see you in court... Why can't we just get along? This issue explores why "litigious" isn't adirty word and how the word "conflict" is used to avoid changing thestatus quo that already hurts some and benefits others. READ IN APP The articles below are likely controversial to some readers, and a breath of fresh air for others. If you want to join me in a real conversation about all of this, please tune in to a special live version of this week’s Growth Rings podcast where I will discuss the content of these articles and answer live questions. Follow this link to set a reminder to attend the live podcast on Friday, October 17 at noon. I'll see you in court! Live Q&A OCT 13 I get this question a lot. I have been suing to transform oppressive systems for over 20 years and almost every time I file a lawsuit I get at least one person asking this. During my career, I have also done groundbreaking, award winning media advocacy and collaborative projects with both private and government actors to come up with creative solutions. When I do that work, I rarely get asked why I didn’t just sue them. I think that’s because a lot of people think “litigious” is a dirty word. I clearly don’t, but let’s explore that a bit and see where you land on the issue. I think I know quite a bit about when and how to use various types of advocacy. In fact, back in 2012 I gave a speech that was published in the Seattle Journal for Social Justice about my approach to advocacy, which I call “Multimodal Advocacy.” Just like when you have a serious medical issue, want to unlock the power of nuclear energy, or get people safely to the moon and back, you want all the various experts at the top of their game from relevant disciplines coming together to share their knowledge and skills, you want a similar array of perspectives and abilities to solve the biggest social problems in our towns, state, and nation. Life Beyond Compliance is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Upgrade to paid Listening to the experts is what is important in these situation. When a litigator with decades of experience enforcing the rights of people with disabilities and a deep understanding of how change actually happens (as opposed to how School House Rock told us to make change when we were children), brings litigation on an issue, you listen. You don’t ask why the they didn’t do something else, unless of course you genuinely want to learn and aren’t just second guessing. Why don’t you just ask nicely? The way I look at it, the more advocacy modalities I have at my disposal, the more advocacy options I have to fine tune the best response to get the greatest good for our community. I am not working in a private law firm with a business model that is based on billing clients for a specific type of service. There is nothing wrong with that business model, it is an important, necessary service in a society that seeks to resolve disputes without resorting to violence. I just offer this because I think it is a foundational reason why my approach may be different than you have seen in your individual life or on TV. I don’t need to deliver a particular service, I work towards a particular end not a particular means. I am simply working to make positive change by whatever means possible. If system actors (like agency bureaucrats, legislative policy makers, administrators of health systems, CEOs of companies, etc.) show me that the most effective and efficient way to make positive change is to work collaboratively with them, then I invest 100% of my effort into mining that vein for as much social good as we can pull out of there together. I am a good student, I can learn based on the feedback I am given. So, if I get a different reception - a system actor shows me that working with them is not an especially effective or efficient way to make necessary transformative change - I know I need to use other techniques. It really is as simple as that. I am agnostic on the advocacy modality, I am dogmatic on the requisite change. For example, you have likely heard of the lawsuit DRMT brought this year to enforce the rights of students with disabilities to attend high school until they turn 22. That case was not based on a new or novel application of the law. It was a long settled federal requirement that the State of Montana just never followed. In fact, every other state in the union was already following the law by the time we filed our case. So when we won that case through a rather quick settlement, every student in the country finally had equal access to education. It is sad Montana’s youth had to be the last to benefit from the federal law. The delay resulted in thousands of collective years of education lost for Montanan students with disabilities. That means Montana lost out on the social and economic impact those thousands of years of education would have produced. Disability Rights Montana had asked the state to follow this law for 10+ years before finally pulling the trigger and filing a lawsuit. Within months of filing the lawsuit, statewide practices have changed and students who were told they aged out of high school at 18 last June were invited to return this fall for four additional years. I hope this helps you understand why professional advocates may use different techniques at different times, or at least why I would. I have a high tolerance for conflict. If you advocate for change, I think you have to. I could be a cook or a baker, I could be a professional weaver or fiber artist, I could be an architect or landscape designer. I love all these things and think I have better than average skills for a lay person in each of these areas. And all of these things involve virtually no conflict. I could do a really good job at any of them and never ruin another person’s day. But I am an advocate and I run a non-profit that does advocacy. That is me at my core. I can’t, and don’t really want to, change that. But it does mean I have to ruin some people’s days. At Disability Rights Montana, our advocacy is designed to achieve a very specific vision – That sounds pretty warm and fuzzy, doesn’t it? I mean who disagrees with that. “Conflict” is simply making powerfulpeople uncomfortable, and I’m okwith that create a society in which people withdisabilities have equal opportunities and areable to participate fully in community life, byexercising choice and self-determination. Why does that have to be contentious at all? Just advocate to make that change in a non-conflict oriented way and nobody gets hurt, right? I want to be clear, as I am not sure this has fully sunk in with everyone, advocacy is inherently conflict oriented. It is not enough to witness suffering, we must daily speak truth to power through our words and actions. You cannot advocate without saying something of consequence that is in direct opposition to other people. There is simply no way around that. Therefore, to ask what I advocated about today is to ask “Who did you oppose today?” “Did the people you opposed know it, and if not did you actually oppose them?” I will explain a little further. Someone at a community event asked me what Disability Rights Montana does. I said, “We advocate for the civil and human rights of people with disabilities and mental illness.” They asked me what “advocate” means. I asked if they were wondering what advocacy means to Disability Rights Montana, like what kinds of advocacy we use, and they said “No, what does the word ‘advocate’ mean?” I thought that was a really good question. My response was that “advocate” is what you do when you see a problem and want to fix it. It could take many forms (see above article), but at its core it is simply problem solving. On its face, “fixing a problem” or “problem solving” don’t necessarily sound confrontational. But I propose that fixing problems is necessarily in conflict with many, if not often the vast majority of, people. That’s because advocates see a problem and want to fix it and not everyone else sees the world the same way. Where one person sees a problem, another may see a perfectly acceptable situation. Therefore, the belief that there is a better way is necessarily in conflict with the status quo. It is in conflict with the people who directly benefit from the status quo. It is in conflict with people who simply do not care about the status quo, but unwittingly benefit from it. And it is even in conflict with people who are unaware of how they are harmed by the status quo. All of these people will label the advocate as ushering in harmful conflict when the advocate asks for a solution to a problem they do not see, because fixing the problem requires they change. Why would they perceive a request for change as a problem? Because all change, even positive change, takes work and is emotionally taxing. Ultimately, they have no motivation to expend that energy if they don’t think there is an urgent need. Instead, they will turn their attack back on the advocate by labeling them as a conflict-generating problem. The existence of conflict comes from simply making a hidden difference in opinion about the existence of a problem visible. Speaking up about something that needs to be fixed did not create the problem to begin with, but it gets blamed for creating the conflict around the problem. Without the conflict created by speaking up, the people benefiting form the status quo could just go along as they were. For them, the conflict is uncomfortable and the status quo is comfortable. However, if you are the person on the receiving end of the problem that needs to be fixed, the status quo is harmful and speaking up moves towards removing that harm. You see, our language around conflict highlights the friction when you work on fixing a problem, but is does nothing to address the underlying harm that already exists by the problem. Conflict is the word we give to the discomfort felt by powerfully people who benefit from the harm done to others. I prefer to disquiet the comfortable in favor of ending harm done to people with disabilities. I’ll make that decision 100 times out of 100. Honestly, if you benefit from inequity, the discomfort you experience from me pointing that out is probably a bonus in my book. With that said, I know that not everyone is comfortable with conflict. I can say with no judgement at all that I think that’s perfectly fine – for most people. But I don’t think it is at all possible for an advocate to be conflict avoidant. To be an advocate of any kind, you must develop some level of comfort with conflict. There are over one million people in Montana. Most of those Montanans are going about their day-to-day lives just trying to survive until tomorrow in the status quo. That means that each individual person working to advocate to disrupt the status quo and replace it with a culture that is inclusive and respectful of people with disabilities needs all the help they can get. I’m not saying this is easy. Even after decades of advocacy, I have to consciously process my emotional response and consider the impact of conflict when I find myself in certain situations. As you read this, you must see yourself somewhere here too. Maybe you want to advocate, but feel in the pit of your stomach that you can’t handle the conflict. Maybe you sometimes question whether you relish in the conflict a little too much and you want a gut check to see if you know the people and things necessary to be a high-level advocate. Whatever direction you come at this from, know that Disability Rights Montana wants to support you in building the culture change we all need to make Montana an incredible, inclusive state. We want to help all of Montana lead the nation in acceptance of disability culture. If you want to formally join online and in person advocacy coalitions and trainings with us, please reach out via the form at the link below and we will be in touch to share upcoming opportunities. Advocacy group and training sign up Thank you for taking the time to read our newsletter. I hope this was helpful. I also hope it doesn’t come across as if I have all the answers. I am just sharing what I have picked up and I continue to learn. Please share with the people you engage in advocacy with both your advocacy partners and the targets of your advocacy. I would love it if they subscribe and we keep this conversation going. Only by all of us leveling up our advocacy and response to advocacy will we be able to build the community we need. Let’s keep pushing for a more inclusive and equitable Montana—together! Share Life Beyond Compliance For questions, comments, or to get involved, just reply to this email or visit our website: disabilityrightsmt.org. In Solidarity, David Carlson Executive Director Share with your advocacy circles Disability Rights Montana Life Beyond Compliance is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Upgrade to paid You’re currently a free subscriber to Life Beyond Compliance. Upgrading to paid subscriptions supports Disability Rights Montana’s work across Montana. Federal funding is no where near sufficient to meet the advocacy and culture change work that is needed. You can help fund the future you want to see! 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