The League of Iowa
Human & Civil Rights Agencies

The poet Wallace Stevens once wrote: "The world is ugly and the people are sad." Stevens was an insurance executive as well as a poet and he spent his commercial life poring over actuarial tables. He saw how fragile luck really is and how our dreams of beauty and health are shortened by accidents, genetics, war and much else. A flap arose not long ago when the Fox cartoon series "Family Guy" featured a character with Down syndrome. The character Ellen was presented as the episodic love interest of Chris, a hapless teenager in the show's central family. Ellen (whose voice-over actor has Down syndrome in real life) tells Chris that her father is an accountant and her mother is the former governor of Alaska. Almost immediately the Palin family reacted with outrage about the joke. The Palins, as many know, have a baby with Down syndrome.

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