There’s a clear campaign against the mentally ill with the global rise of fascism. Lots of it shows up in anti homeless rhetoric, but you can see it in the MAHA and anti vaccination movements.
There’s no reason to use the word “r-tarded” to describe someone. As someone who’s worked with the intellectually challenged, it’s an insult to them to compare them with people who are willfully ignorant.
I agree with you. Like I told a family member who made all the same arguments the people in these comments are making: "I am not trying to tell you what you can and cannot say. I’m telling you that if I hear you use language like that, I will respect you less and I will talk to you less or not at all. " We don’t talk much anymore, and thats fine.
That’s really the main point. Getting around the “euphemism treadmill” and the idea of “policing speech” that have been the main points of most of the other comments - it’s not that I think it should be illegal to say it, but that I will think much less of you as a person. It takes so little effort to try to avoid words that people can be harmed by.
I think it reflects the way that the marginalization of disabled people is invisible in even “leftist” spaces. The severely cognitively delayed are usually shafted off into a “self contained” room, and so it’s really easy to have a warped picture of what someone with intellectual difficulties is like. I did a little program in college where I spent a lot of time with an adult day respite center - something like a “day care” for non-independent adults who lived with family. There were definitely a lot of things alien to me about the way they lived their lives but they were all human. They had stuff they liked - and it wasn’t “kid stuff.” They could express what they thought about the food they were eating, what they wanted to do, idk, the point is that they had the same basic right to agency that we all do. And this is something that not even the most “leftist” politicians or thinkers engage with at all. Conservatives ofc, seem to think we should just kill them or let them die.