The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Wednesday unanimously approved a bill that would eliminate the use of the words "retarded" and "retardation" in federal health, education and labor law.
Rosa's Law, introduced by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), had strong bipartisan support.
It would replace the terms "mental retardation" with "intellectual disability" and "mentally retarded individual" to "individual with an intellectual disability."
Of course in a generation calling someone an "individual with an intellectual disability" will be considered, uh, retarded.
WFDS
You do realize, of course, that this sounds like a standard act to just clean up language in existing laws. It doesn't create new law. It doesn't banish those words to hell or anything.
ReplyDeleteIt just states that in existing legislation - sometimes passed decades earlier - the use of those terms will be updated to reflect current language.
The point is this is pretty standard stuff. Seems a waste of time for even a blogger to get all worked up about. Save that for the neocons, who are probably salivating at another chance to yell socialist randomly.
Your better than that . . . isn't there something else, anywhere, that might be more worthy of your efforts?
Actually, Anon, may I call you Anon? I think that the political correctness that this rejigging of the language represents is insane in the membrane.
ReplyDeleteWFDS
I suspect that "retarded" has a pretty specific definition while "intellectual disability" can mean just about anything.
ReplyDeleteAre you forgetful? Intellectual disability.
Are you an asshole? Intellectual disability.
Can't read? Intellectual disability.
However, none of the cases above would qualify as "retarded" from a legal sense. So by changing the language, they have changed the law.
Actually, I prefer the term "All Knowing" but there wasn't an "all knowing" option on your comment drop-down.
ReplyDeleteSo let's suppose several agencies who work with physically and intellectually disabled individuals suggest they'd prefer to remove the term "retarded" in years of legislation due to the negative connotations, especially for children. By your rationale (can I call it rationale?) the proper response of elected officials is to say "Suck it up, retard lovers. We're not politically correct around here."
First off, ignoring the fact that the very term "politically correct" was dreamed up by neocons in the 90s in an attempt to define progressive minded individuals as outcasts, it seems a better response might be to say, "No harm done. Across party lines, we agree to make this change."
That seems to be what is occurring here, so again I am struck why you are wasting your time on this.
Is this really the most important topic you could find to address today - Bi-partisan support to help ease the stigma of a class of individuals with the deck stacked against them in society?
Nothing else . . . no big environmental disasters, no thwarting of transparency laws? Nothing else at all?
If so, carry on. Ciao.