By: ANDREW BOLT   

The debate over the value of `deaf culture' is multiculturalism gone mad -- and denying some deaf children the chance to hear

HOW mad can multiculturalism get? Mad enough, it turns out, to insist that more than a dozen Australian children stay deaf.

Yes, Melbourne's Bionic Ear Institute estimates that up to 20 deaf children are banned from having cochlear implants -- or bionic ears -- that will enable them to hear.

And the reason?
``The parents' decision is usually based on the `deaf culture' argument,'' says the institute's acting boss, Professor Richard Dowell.

Let me translate for you: this is the argument that claims deaf people are not really people who tragically can't hear, but in fact are an identity group -- like ``Chinese-Australian'', or ``gay'', or ``people of colour'' -- with their own culture.

Or as Therese Pierce, the principal of the Victorian College of the Deaf, said recently: ``Deafness is not a disability, it is a language minority.''

And in multicultural Australia, it would be intolerant to destroy a language minority by doing something so oppressive as ask it to learn English or -- in this case -- help the deaf to hear.

HEAVENS, no. Haven't we been told by our academics that all cultures are equally valid, and that differences must be celebrated, not transcended?

Doesn't even the Australian Association of the Deaf insist ``the language and culture of our deaf community form a recognised part of our multi-cultural society'', and that ``deaf people do not see deafness as something which needs to be `cured' ''?

Absolutely! And if you object, you must be a deafist.
All this fashionable identity politics means, of course, that to give deaf children hearing would be to steal them from their culture, just as those who rescued Aboriginal children from gross neglect and abuse are now accused of ``stealing'' a ``generation'' and committing ``cultural genocide''.

Professor Dowell accepts the analogy: ``In fact, I've heard it claimed that Professor (Graeme) Clark (the Melbourne inventor of the cochlear implant) and his colleagues at the institute are committing genocide.''

It's absurd, only Professor Dowell isn't laughing. Not when he thinks of the children who must suffer for this ideology.

``It does break your heart when you see children who would have a good chance of success with an implant and it doesn't go ahead for reasons that don't seem to be valid,'' he says.

WHAT makes this tragedy worse is that the longer such parents deny their children a cochlear implant, the less the chance they can ever be helped.

These devices, which translate and transmit sounds to the brain, work best when implanted in babies. By the time a child turns 18, it is too late. They are almost certainly doomed to be deaf forever.

And that is just what most lobby groups for the deaf seem happy to accept. The AAD, for instance, claims cochlear implants generate publicity which ``demeans deaf people, demeans their culture and language'', and urges that no child under 18 be given one.

The World Federation of the Deaf also demands a stop to implants for children, for the same reasons.
Even Hollywood has now taken up the cause of ``deaf culture'', with the cochlear implant cast in the role of an agent of genocide.

Last year it gave an Oscar nomination to Sound and Fury, a documentary which shows a deaf couple agonising over whether to let their daughter, 6, have an implant.

In the film, the mother asks her girl: ``Why do you want a cochlear implant now?''
``Because I want to hear everything,'' she replies.
Tough. Her parents decide she must stay deaf. To give her hearing would just damage deaf culture.
As her dad explains: ``If the technology progresses, maybe it's true deaf people would become extinct, and my heart will be broken.''

It's a frightening sign of our intellectual degradation and cultural insecurity that such shoddy arguments -- with such cruel results -- are backed by the cleverest of academics.

American psychologist Harlan Lane even got a $650,000 ``genius award'' from the MacArthur Foundation for writing books like The Mask of Benevolence, in which he argues that deaf people are a ``linguistic and cultural minority'' which has been oppressed by the ``audist establishment'' and ``colonised'' like some Third World country.

S UCH up-to-the-minute post-modernism is echoed in our own universities.
Next month will see the release of Damned for Their Difference: The Cultural Construction of Deaf People as Disabled, a book by Associate Professor Don Miller of Monash University and Professor Jan Branson, head of the National Institute for Deaf Studies and Sign Language Research at La Trobe University.

Their publicity promises a book that will discuss deaf culture, and how it's been shaped by ``imperialism'' and ``medicalisation'', as well as ``multiculturalism and assertion of ethnic rights and identities''.

And it will argue that ``disabled'' is a ``term whose meaning hinges upon constant negotiation between parties''.
Well, no, professors, it doesn't hinge on that at all.
``Disabled'' in this case means simply that someone can't hear. You could stand in a milkbar all day and not strike one customer who'd have trouble with that notion, or who'd want to ``negotiate'' it.

But get a multiculturalist on the case and -- oops -- suddenly six-year-olds who just want to hear are being sentenced to deafness.

bolta@heraldsun.com.au