Ann Coulter, infamous conservative pundit, decided to use the R-word in a tweet. She used it to refer to President Obama shortly after one of the Presidential debates. Her poor choice of phrase is angering parents of children who have intellectual disabilities. That is just one of the reasons why Ann Coulter shouldn’t have used the R-word.
On October 12, 2012, Ann Coulter sent out a Tweet that has been getting her a lot of negative attention. The exact wording of the tweet was:
“I highly approve of Romney’s decision to be kind and gentle to the retard.”
This was in reference to a political debate between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. She decided to use the R-word to insult the President of the United States of America. The use of the R-word also is an insult to all people who have an intellectual disability, specifically because the word has been used as a “put-down” for so many years.
It is acceptable for her to choose to use name-calling to attack a politician that she doesn’t like. It is completely unacceptable for her to insult people who have special needs in the process. Ann Coulter has written several books. This means that her decision to use a hurtful word was intentional. Doing so makes her look mean and immature.
There has been an ongoing campaign to encourage people to stop using the word “retard” or “retarded”. California created a bill earlier this year that will change the wording in official government documents to exclude the R-word. It will replace the phrase “mentally retarded” with either “intellectual disability” or “person with an intellectual disability”.
In 2010, Congress banned the words “retard” and “retardation” in all 2010 federal health, education, and labor laws. Again, they replaced those words with “intellectual disability”.
The American Psychiatric Association is working on the DSM 5. In it, they will replace the term “mental retardation” with “intellectual developmental disorder”. Ann Coulter should have realized that when a word or phrase is intentionally removed from federal laws and the DSM that is an indication that the word is not acceptable.
A quick scroll through the responses to that particular tweet makes it obvious that Ann Coulter didn’t make any friends by using the R-word. Scroll through them, and you will see that people are upset and disgusted by what she tweeted. It is never healthy to seek out negative attention. In classrooms across the United States, teachers take notice of the child who frequently exhibits bad behavior and take action to get that child some help.
In short, Ann Coulter shouldn’t have used the R-word because it is hurtful to people who have an intellectual disability, and also to the people who love them. She shouldn’t have used it because it is just plain mean. She shouldn’t have used it because doing so makes everything else she says less credible.
Image by Gage Skidmore on Flickr