Justice & Law Quote by Major Owens

Owens frames disability rights not as a niche add-on, but as a strategic next chapter in an American argument that had already been battle-tested. The key tell is his blunt, almost campaign-floor pragmatism: "the best route" and "get folks to understand... fast". He is talking about persuasion under real political constraints, where moral clarity alone rarely moves legislation. The word "segregation" does heavy lifting here, deliberately collapsing the distance between wheelchair ramps and lunch counter sit-ins. It’s an analogy with an agenda: if you can name the problem as segregation, you can inherit the public’s existing shame and the courts’ existing logic.

The subtext is coalition politics. By citing civil rights and women's rights as having a "clear history", Owens is acknowledging a kind of social infrastructure: narratives, martyrs, legal precedents, organizing tactics, and a vocabulary of discrimination that had already entered mainstream consciousness. Disability rights, long treated as charity or private tragedy, needed to be re-described as a public injustice with structural causes. He’s arguing that movements succeed when they can borrow legitimacy, not just demand it.

Context matters: Owens came up in an era when the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act reshaped what "equal protection" could mean in practice, and when second-wave feminism expanded the idea that exclusion can be systemic, not incidental. His point is quietly radical: disability rights didn’t become "easier" because society got kinder, but because earlier fights built a template for seeing barriers as political choices rather than natural facts.