Thursday, November 1, 2012

Disabilities: Cognitive: The morals of using the word "retard" to refer to a person

When people who are cognitively-impaired understand thoroly the motives of a a shoot-from-the-hip gal like Ann Coulter, you'd think she'd signal to the public she's embarassed at her own insensitivity, rather than justify it.  Once she gets her teeth into something, she just doesn't let go until it or she is left in rags.  Ann, please, say you're sorry.  You don't have to cringe or enter a publically-obvious state of shame to do so.  Good people can be thoughtless at times, too.  But John Franklin Stephens is a person with feelings who gets hurt when that word selects from the totality of his personality to cast him into a stereotype that edifies no one.  It's sad to note that writer Amy Julia Becker finishes her critical analysis by her entangling herself in Coulter's earlier statement that drags Sarah Palin's son Trig into the discussion:  "Here, Coulter uses much more subtle language about disability than she did last week, yet she demonstrates a similar disregard for the worth of the person in question. [For Coulter,] Trig is not Palin’s son, but “a Down-syndrome baby.” His diagnosis comes first, his personhood second. And Palin has become an exemplar of a cause rather than a mother who loves her child."  

But I say: Not everybody has to always be on their toes about who they stereotypically find "worthy" or not.  We do abstract features, or a single feature of a person, from their overall and complex personality, which anyway we can only know in part.  That's why intimacy is so important — we come to know another person in many, many aspects of events and personality traits that are so complex they become nearly unanalyzable at all.  Coulter selected one aspect of Sarah Palin's son's personality in order to give optimal information, no more and no more less, about Palin's character and moral stamina and deep love.  Coulter wasn't talking about Trig, and didn't name him; she gave him a bit of privacy instead of making him, the child, a household word.  Why pillory Coulter for the optimality of her speech; she obviously doesn't have close contact with a cognitively-challenged person, as I don't either, and she can abstract to refer to what she's taking about in Mother Palin without giving us a thesis on personhood and a salut to Trig.  It's obvious Coulter knows that both Mr Stephens and Master Palin are cognitively-impaired, but she doesn't distract to a Hat Tip to Personhood of Cognitively-Challenged persons, she goes after the President in the quickest, sharpest, and rhetorically powerful use of hyperbole — which everybody knows in hearing her go at him.  Look at the people the President sneers, cajoles, and discredits every day on the campaign trail.

But Amy Julia Becker has also re-inforced our perception that Ann Coulter was insensitive because she referred to an aggregate, the idea of "Down-syndrome baby" not any particular such person.  Now, she's been drawn into a first-step toward intimacy.  Becker has drawn Coulter into a discourse about  several persons — Stephens, mother Palin, son Trig, Coulter, and herself Becker, and now by writing about these folks, my name joins the list too, as a result of my action of writing about it all.  But all we get here is a discourse still necessasrily abstracted around "Down-syndrom baby."  Becker's stance is just too sentimentalist for me.  John Franklin Stephens, oin the other hand, with his video in defense of his fellow-atheletes with disablities shows himself to be a person of integrity, courage, protest against insensitivity, and spokesman for the very positive culturally-contributive athletes with disablities.  Good on you John! Practice a little humility, Ms Coulter, you don't have to be right about your wordings every time, you hurt the feelings of a whole group of persons, and that's not so good. Ms Becker, you've woven a web of moralistic connections that doesn't hold water so well.  Please, stand down a bit.

— Albert Gedraitis

Christianity Today (Nov1,2k12)

October 30, 2012

Ann Coulter and the Witness of John Franklin Stephens


What Christians can learn from the man with Down Syndrome 
who responded to Coulter's use of the 'r' word.


Last week Ann Coulter sent media ablaze with a short tweet in response to the presidential foreign policy debate: “I highly approve of Governor Romney’s decision to be kind and gentle to the retard.” Her tweet has been favorited and retweeted by both supporters and detractors thousands of times since.

It would be easy to dismiss her statement. It’s possible that Coulter made a mistake, that she didn’t mean to imply that our Harvard-educated President is stupid. Or that she didn’t really mean to offend hundreds of thousands of Americans who have been diagnosed with an intellectual disability by using a form of what was once a clinical term (mental retardation) as a slur. But Coulter has defended herself, saying she has no regrets about the tweet. On Fox News, Coulter explained, “‘Retard’ had been used colloquially to just mean ‘loser’ for 30 years.” To Piers Morgan she fired back: “It’s offensive according to whom? Moron, idiot, cretin, imbecile, these were exactly like retard, once technical terms to describe people with mental disabilities.”

Coulter’s own track record demonstrates both a persistent use of the word and an inability to understand what it implies. A few years back, Coulter, who says she is a Christian, wrote a profile of Sarah Palin forTime in which she defended Palin’s pro-life credentials like this: “she really did walk the walk on abortion when she found out she was carrying a Down-syndrome baby.” Here, Coulter uses much more subtle language about disability than she did last week, yet she demonstrates a similar disregard for the worth of the person in question. Trig is not Palin’s son, but “a Down-syndrome baby.” His diagnosis comes first, his personhood second. And Palin has become an exemplar of a cause rather than a mother who loves her child. 

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