The Retard Issue turns even awesomer

I've been meaning for a while to write about the whole "retard" controversy that started with Rahm Emmanuel, was intercepted by Sarah Palin, then Steven Colbert, and is now resting comfortably in the hands of the horrible writers over at Family Guy. I have worked with lots of special needs kids and I have a joke about how I don't think it's okay to say the word "retarded," because language is powerful (feminists have been organizing for over 100 years and people still use the word "cunt" every day). In general, I think people who use it don't mean it to be hurtful, but that's the same shit people said when they use to use "gay" as an insult, and luckily, in the last few years, it's become pretty accepted amongst forward-thinking people that is not acceptable. I used to work with an amazing boy with autism, and his mom said that she used to use "retarded" all the time, but ever since she had her son she couldn't hear it without feeling a sting. That's as much of a reason as any, if you ask me, to find a different fucking word to insult people. There are plenty.
That said, Matt Taibbi has a great analysis of why we shouldn't be worrying so much about the word "retard" when we're talking about what Ramn Emmanuel said. I would side with Palin about the word being hurtful except that she had to go and be a hippocrite about Rush Limbaugh. Colbert, as always, was spot-on. And, for the first time in history, I'm going to say that Family Guy has done something awesome.
I didn't watch the show's most recent controversial episode about a girl with Down Syndrome (who is the daughter of the former governor of Alaska), but the actress who voiced the Down Syndrome character, Andrea Fay Friedman, actually has Down Syndrome. Friedman wrote the New York Times with some fantastic criticism of Palin's exploitation of her son Trig, and as Broadsheet's Mary Elizabeth Williams points out, she is funnier than most of the writers for Family Guy.
It's wonderful to actually hear Friedman's voice-- a voice that is categorically (and, as demonstrated here, wrongly) left out of the discussion. We should all be smart enough to know that people with special needs can be their own advocates, but that we still have a responsibility to advocate for what's right. I believe that part of that means choosing your insult words carefully, but it also means that even issues about special needs should be approached with compassion and complexity. Friedman shows us that it's a mistake to make categorical assumptions about what is and is not offensive. And so, I hate to say this, but I'm going to have to side with Family Guy on this one.