Christina Mailhot got teased a lot as a child.
Born with Down syndrome, words like “retard” were flung at her every day, meant to be insulting. So when Mailhot, now 33 and a member of the Augusta-based self-advocacy group Speaking Up For Us, heard state officials using “mentally retarded” in relation to people with disabilities, she cringed.
“It’s legal talk; they’re legal words saying we are stupid,” she said. “I’m not that stupid, you know.”
Soon, such words will be wiped from Maine law and removed from the names of some Department of Health and Human Services programs. They will be replaced with phrases like “intellectual disability” and “person with a disability.”
“It’s about time,” Mailhot said. “It took forever.”
Disability rights advocates began pushing for a change in law in 2006. People with developmental disabilities and their families were growing frustrated with disparaging words in Maine law, including “crippled,” “deranged” and “invalids.” In 2007, the state Legislature asked the Maine Developmental Disabilities Council in Augusta to create a work group to identify the offensive words and phrases in state statutes.
“The stuff that was in there was just horrendous,” said Christina Mailhot’s mother, Irene Mailhot, who is director of Speaking Up For Us.
That work group came up with 62 terms found in hundreds of places throughout state law and policies and used regularly in public discussions.
Since then, various laws have been passed to replace offensive terms. One immediately removed a few words from state statutes and one changed the name of a program. Another law directed DHHS to review its statutes and come up with a plan to replace the offensive words, but Julia Bell, executive director of the Maine Developmental Disabilities Council, said DHHS never moved forward. Last year, she said, DHHS was directed to work with the council on the necessary changes.
A few weeks ago, the Legislature passed LD 1845, a bill that changes much of the remaining language in state statute and DHHS programs. Many of those changes turn “mental retardation” into “intellectual disability” and “mentally ill” into “person with a mental illness.”
Advocates say the changes remove the hated “retardation,” which was used frequently decades ago but has since become a schoolyard taunt. They say the changes also help to emphasize the person over the disability by placing the person first in a phrase.
“Just like you wouldn’t say ‘the cancer person,’” Irene Mailhot said. “You wouldn’t put the illness first. So why would you do that here?”
Gov. Paul LePage signed the bill on March 20. Because it was emergency legislation, the changes go into effect immediately.
Advocates hope the changes will set an example by showing some language is offensive and shouldn’t be used.
“So often the language we use ends up reflecting our beliefs or steering our beliefs,” Bell said. “It’s a first step.”
To see more from the Sun Journal, visit sunjournal.com.
So glad we got people to tackle the real issues afflicting our state like this one. Screw the budget, screw the drugs. We need to make sure people use nice words so our feewings don’t get hurt!
From the same people that brought us the Whoopie Pie bill.
They forgot to substitute “living impaired” for dead.
Or welfare recipients can now be “motivationally dispossessed”.
They forgot ‘Queer’; now ‘Gay’. I have always been Gay but not ‘Queer’!
Here we go again. In the mid 1920 The term Mental retardation was adopted to replace terms/words that were deemed offensive. I have a brother who has
Syndromic mental retardation( intellectual deficits associated with other medical and behavioral signs and symptoms). He was bullied. He was Called “retarded” It did hurt his feelings. I taught him that they are just words. They have no power but what you give them.
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Nothing like using 6 words to replace 1 that worked.
So instead of “the handicapped” we have “the disabled” or the more approved term “people with disabilities”.
I remember it was only a short time ago when the word crippled or cripple was replaced with the word handicapped. Now handicapped is no longer PC so we substitute the word disability.
I give them about two years and they will start feeling “bad” when people say they have a disability. Disability will become the new disparaging word. What will the next acceptable word be? They have already devalued the word “special”.
I know! They will all become “exceptional”!!! And most of us will scratch our heads and wonder at the newest PC craze.
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Like how many insulting words and phrases have been ‘invented’ to slander our new governor? New word; same meaning and intent; just more fuel for haters.
as the parent of a child with Down syndrome, I completely support this and applaud its passage. Children with disabilities are more and more being given a role in their own educational and social planning. For a child who is taunted with the word “retard” to have to hear the phrase “mentally retarded” over and over again in school meetings, IEPs, Drs visits and the like is detrimental. Imagine being called a retard on the bus and then hearing an adult use the term to call themselves stupid? The R word hurts. Hooray for Governor LePage and self advocates!
So what is going to be the effect of hearing themselves described as developmentally disabled over and over again? Do you think they are somehow not going to know what it means?
I know, the truth sometimes hurts. And it hurts you to see your child feel hurt. Maybe everyone’s efforts would be better spent in teaching how to deal with hurt and the truth. I believe that would serve them better in the years to come instead of tilting at windmills.
I guess if and when a word begins to take a different connotation or common use, we address it then? Im as Conservative a NO GOVERMENT CRAP girl as they get, and I hear ya. But I also know what words cut a kid to the quick. This one does. If somehow, kids in the future learn to call one another “DDs” in some disparaging way, then we can deal with it then. maybe Im naive to believe this, but I do kinda hope that todays generations of kids are growing up understanding different” a little better. If my daughters school is any indication, a LOT of kids are being raised right.
So should we stop using the labels “savant, genious, brainiac, wisenheimer, gifted” and so on? Just to be fair to both ends of the intellectual spectrum? We could just lump them all together as” intellectually enabled.” Then what do we do about “average”? No one wants to be labelled as just average! And ‘tweeners’ wouldn’t be right. Oh wait, I got it, “intellectual moderates” – aka ‘Cutlers’ for short.
Instead of “right wing conservative” or Tea nagger we should say “Person with conscience disability”.
Instead of left wing liberal we could say “Person who suffers from fact and logic disability”.
Thant’s really funny coming from the “attack , distract and defect” wing of the GOP.
Here we go again! We wiped the word squaw from Maine because of those who bastardized it’s use . Now we are doing the same thing with retarded a word that has also been bastardized. When will this stop. Why do so many support banning things when some use them incorrectly instead of simply saying hey your using that wrong.
Other words we will be removing because they offend someone.
Fat
Lazy
Welfare
Evil
Church
White
Black
( all other colors)
Jew – being a jew the term does not bother me personally as I understand the USER is the one with the issue.
Corporation
Rich
Poor
This list could go on and on…
I see the moonbats down at the Augusta bat house are still engaged in doing busy work .
Now how about you getting rid of those electronic voting machines and vote scanners
and give voters a copy of how they voted so we can elect people who advance human evolution not retard it, eh?
this just in
The ‘Voter Fraud’ Fraud
Ari Berman on April 4, 2012 http://www.thenation.com/blog/167217/voter-fraud-fraud
This is political correctness at its worst. The real notion here is that people don’t want to be labeled anything but normal and consider such labeling as pejorative even though it is in fact descriptive. Eventually the word “special” will become a pejorative because it is now a euphemism for various sorts of disability. The fact is that “mentally retarded” is a medical term for someone with an IQ of 79 or below. You may cringe at that but it is what it takes for certain benefits to accrue.
Again, this is advocatitis at its worst.