Disabled woman, heckled by teabaggers, strikes back

Marianne Hoynes delivers a statement at a New Jersey town hall

Remember the reprehensible people who insulted and shouted down a woman in a wheelchair at Congressman Frank Pallone's New Jersey town hall meeting? As it turns out, the harassers weren't even from New Jersey; they were teabaggers from New York. (We call this artificial inflation of dissent astroturfing, and the right has practiced it profusely in recent debates.)

The woman who was verbally abused, Marianne Hoynes, went on MSNBC to discuss her experience at that town hall meeting. She identified many of her hecklers as New York residents who had no business being at the meeting; she suggested that their goal was to silence information from the Congressman or the public that "they just didn't want anybody to hear." Her description of the teabaggers' behavior was stunning: "...outside they were chanting, but as time went on, and certainly by the time we got into that room, which held about 500 people, they got more and more verbally violent -- I don't know how else to describe it. They began by just screaming and yelling at Congressman Pallone that he should have been aborted, and that his mother should have had an abortion, that he was a domestic terrorist."

The Anchorage Liberal Examiner has already covered the abhorrent treatment of Ms. Hoynes in a previous post about the complete lack of Republican compassion for the disabled and the uninsured. Hearing Hoynes give an account of the night from her perspective, though, adds more fuel to this fire. You'll recall that one of the louder protesters later grumbled to a cameraman that the "disabled woman in a chair has more rights than I do."

Hoynes struck upon an important point in her interview, which is that the actions of these teabaggers were anti-democratic and anti-American. Town hall meetings are a place for a Congressman to speak to his constituents and to answer their questions. When people come to the meetings with the intention of stifling debate either by being the loudest people in the room or by intimidating others by openly carrying guns, they impede one of the most important connections a Congressman can make with the people he represents. Hoynes showed great strength, though, by shouting over the hecklers to finish her statement calling for Congressman Pallone to "hear the voice of the disabled." Hearing the voices of the less powerful, the disenfranchised, the socially or physically handicapped: that is what matters, and that is what these teabaggers are fighting.