A very apposite tweet just now…
Dan Savage
@fakedansavage Thank you for supporting marriage equality,@gopmommy, but respectfully: If you think I’ve bullied people, you don’t know what bullying is.
Been there! Been there, been there, been there.
Butterflies and Wheels
Gnu atheism, women's rights, internationalism, universalism, and gossip
The bullies crying that they’re being persecuted because they would no longer have free reign to persecute their victims. This fight is identical in every respect.
Ophelia—you’re old enough to remember the civil rights movement, at least as a kid, though I don’t know how much attention you paid at the time. If you did, do you remember racists calling black people “the real bigots?” Is that just a recent thing, or has that always gone on? I was shocked to discover it in the political discourse over the past five years or so. It’s such a perverse insult.
Ophelia, the first link doesn’t work.
I didn’t pay nearly enough attention, Josh, because I was a clueless daydreamy kid always lost in other things. But from what I do remember (and have learned since) – I think there wasn’t much of that until the non-SCLC people got more “militant.” I don’t specifically remember the Black Panthers being called “the real bigots” but there was plenty of othering rhetoric of the same type. (By that time I was paying a little more attention.)
I don’t remember any “the real bigots” talk. I think that is fairly recent.
The projection I recall was “They want to start a race war”. I do remember a friend of the family telling me that he was stocking up guns because he was going to need them because the negroes were planning to attack.
Josh, I’m not old enough to remember the Civil Rights era, but that tactic is quite new. The concept of bigotry as inherently bad hadn’t yet gotten embedded into mainstream society, so there was no real motivation for the bigots to project their bigotry onto the anti-bigots. The racism they were likely to express was “unreconstructed.”
I’ve been called. a heterophobe, and told that using CAB (currently able-bodied) to refer to people who aren’t disabled is “mean”. Apparently it means I wish harm and disability on CAB people.
If they could stop their knees from jerking. (Hmm, is that a disability? Reactionopathy!) they’d be able to find that it’s a term that reflects that, in some people, disability is not a 24/7/365 situation. So the C refers to those in periods of remission, and the AB is self.explanatory.
Oh yeah, and I’ve even been faced with angry tears from cis people and neurotypical people. Why? It hurt them that trans and non-NT people “felt the need to make up slurs instead of just using ‘normal'”
I am such a bigot.
/shame
A nym too:
I’m OK with CAB. TAB (“temporarily able-bodied”), however, is remarkably passive-aggressive IMO. “Nice legs. Shame if anything happened to them.”
And not everybody becomes disabled during their lifetimes. Some people die without any disabilities. “Temporarily alive” is much more accurate.
Ms Daisy Cutter:
Agreed that TAB could be seen as passive-aggressive. CAB, on the other hand, is honest and accurate – though there are certainly some who die without disabilities, no humans (AFAIK) are born able to walk, communicate clearly, feed themselves and otherwise take care of our bodily needs.
Urgh. Just mentally put an “end blockquote” tag at the end of that first graf.
Theo Bromine: A perfectly healthy and medically normal (yeah, I said “normal,” so sue me) infant or toddler is able-bodied for his or her stage of development.
Can we please not distort the meanings of words and phrases for social-justice cred, kthx?