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.
There’s a historical cycle where the helping professions rotate the terminology out, as the wider culture overloads the old terms with insulting usage. Eventually the new vernacular leaks out into general parlance and the cycle cycles. “Retarded” was once acceptable clinical terminology because "idiot, “moron”, and “imbecile” had accumulated cultural baggage. The latter terms were, themselves, once politically correct alternatives to even older terms.
I think it’s naive to think that THIS time is special, and today’s politically correct terminology won’t ever leak out into common usage as a slur too.
Which gets to the larger problem - the dehumanization of people with intellectual and cognitive disabilities. Being such a person is considered such a bad thing that it can be used as an insult. Whatever terminology we use, people with cognitive delays are just as human, just as valuable as anyone else.
I mean, yes? Ultimately that’s exactly what an insult is. Think of the other words we use as curses and insults. Asshole. Mother fucker. Bitch. Cunt. Dick. Shit(head). Dumbass. Pendejo. Cabron.
Do you want to be something stinky (asshole, cunt, dick, shit), or something disliked (bitch, mother fucker)? Do you want to be like the people who the terms moron, idiot, imbecile, retarded, handicapped, or disabled are describing? Hell, extend it to other things. If someone 6 feet tall was calling you, a 5’4" man, a midget, it’s not like your height suddenly will change if the term is accepted for you, it’s because you don’t want to be perceived as someone short enough to be termed appropriately as such.
And as much as we can all consider everyone human to be just as valuable as any other human, people aren’t suddenly going to want to be short, or have low intelligence / ability to learn/comprehend/adapt. This is why I ultimately have given up on policing the language in general. We are forever locked into the cycle of words becoming inappropriate, because the vast majority of folks genuinely abhor the idea of becoming something like those words are describing, whether its mental ability, height, likeability, worth, etc. You’re not going to change that, ever.
Right, so then we rotate words again. This isn’t hard. We’re not trying to find the One True Politically Correct Term; we’re arguing that one (1) specific word has a negative bias and we need to stop using it.
If a group of people are telling me this word was and continues to be used as a dehumanizing slur, that’s enough for me to look into a vocabulary change. More importantly, the very existence of a euphemism treadmill shows that you can’t stop at language change, and that disabled people need to be much more fully accepted in society.