Kristen Cox greets a visitor with a firm handshake and a strong gaze, and only the long, thin cane hints at the fact that she is almost totally blind.
“It?s an inconvenience that you work around,” Cox told The Examiner.
Her blindness “started when I was about 11,” growing up in Utah, due to a rare recessive trait, said Cox, who is now 36.
“I had to memorize everything” when she went through Brigham Young University, Cox said, because she didn?t know Braille. “If you?re born blind you tend to get those skills early on.” Despite her disability, she served a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Brazil.
She finally learned Braille because “I wanted to read to my son,” she said.
She got to know Robert Ehrlich when he was a congressman and she was a lobbyist for the National Federation of the Blind, based in Baltimore. “Even then, he was a real champion for disabilities.”
Ehrlich named Cox to head the Governor?s Office on Disabilities and then created a Cabinet-level department for disabilities, which the administration says is the first in the U.S.
The department is small ? about 25 people ? and helps coordinate and evaluate the programs throughout the rest of the government. “We spend about $4 billion on people with disabilities” in Maryland, Cox said. “We can be very objective about services. ? We don?t have anything to lose.”
Being an advocate for the people with disabilities comes naturally to Cox: “If you have a disability, you?re always an advocate for yourself,” she said.
