Ozzy Osbourne's Animus Toward People With Disabilities

If you think that popular culture values people with disabilities, you’ve been asleep or seriously not paying attention.

Read on.

Tracy Latimer was a 13-year old Canadian girl who was significantly impaired by cerebral palsy, in chronic pain, and suffered serious epileptic seizures.

Tracy was murdered by her father, Robert.

He put her in the family car and killed her by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Robert Latimer was convicted of second-degree murder in 1993.

He’s already out on parole.

What was most astounding about the Latimer case was that there was widespread public support for what he had done, showing that many Canadians felt that killing Tracy was justified because of her severe disability.

Fast-forward to this week.

Ozzy Osbourne's new album contains a song about Tracy's murder.

It’s sympathetic to Robert.

From the Vancouver Sun:

The 10th track of Osbourne's solo album entitled Scream, due out June 22, is Latimer's Mercy which describes what Latimer may have felt in putting his daughter to death. The lyrics are poetic yet brutally graphic.

"The sun shines on this deadly new mourning/The church bells ring an early warning/Your eyes shine as I turn on the motor/The tears fall as the mercy gets closer."

"I won't say I know what I'm doing/I won't say I'm sorry/I can't bring you back but I can't leave you helpless/I'll make the pain rest in peace."

This refrain is repeated:

"Another day and another full seizure/Another pill, you spiral down deeper/Another cut by a surgical butcher/It's just a way of prolonging the torture."

Ah, yes, poetic putting-Tracy-out-of-her-misery lyrics.That’s bad enough, and if Osbourne left it at that I suppose he could claim artistic license.

But he didn’t.

He went ahead and told us what he really feels about children with disabilities:

"I don't know if I could do that to my own child but I'm not in that position," Osbourne said.

"To put your child to death is a big decision. I'm not one to go, 'You're wrong, you shouldn't do that,' or 'You did the right thing,' Osbourne said the interview.

"I'm in the middle of the road. I question myself, thinking 'How would I deal with that?' It's a very big decision to make."

This is blatant animus to people with disabilities.

When a public figure openly writes a song applauding the killing people with disabilities, profits from it, and then refuses to strongly condemn said killing, we’re very, very far down the slippery slope into open hostility and increased violence to people with disabilities.

We’d better wake up.

Start by never accessing anything that Osbourne does ever again.