An Open Letter To John C McGinley About His Article 'What Really Happens When You Use the R-Word'

Mr McGinley, I think you're an excellent actor. One example: your work on "Scrubs." Let me ask you something: what do you think of the hundreds if not thousands of times over the course of that series when your character called Zach Braff's character a "girl" and/or called him by a woman's name? It wasn't the high point of the series for me. The clear implication was that there was something wrong with being a girl and/or a man's being effeminate and/or emotionally open and sensitive. These sentiments were constantly slung af Braff's character in order to get laughs. I suppose we should stop using the word "girl." Clearly, using the "G-word" is hurtful.

What's that? I'm being ridiculous? You're right, I'm being completely ridiculous.. And you and all other advocates of PC speech are being just as ridiculous, because the problem is not particular words, it's how those words are used. It's racism and sexism and other forms of prejudice. The problem is a lack of love and a lack of common decency. It's using words to hurt. The words themselves are not the problem, and focusing on them in this way is only a distraction from the actual problem, and the entire PC-speech movement a huge waste of time. And I say all of this as an autistic who is occasionally called the "R-word," and who happens to find the word "autistic" very useful and doesn't want to see "the A-word" be tabooed. But that's the direction we're headed in.

We want the same thing here: more respect for each other, more caring in the world, especially for people who are relatively defenseless. Please don't think I would ever wish any hurt to your son. I wish you all the best, and I wish him a long life full of love and joy, surrounded by people with hearts as good as yours.

Open Letter To Amanda Gutterman

Dear Ms Gutterman, the following is in response to your Huffington Post article What I'm Actually Giving Up For Lent, about your participation in the campaign to stamp out "the R-word." I originally posted it as a Reader's Comment under your article, but it occurred to me that I might want to save it and publish it here, rather than wait and see whether it was going to pass through HP's moderation. In my original Reader's Comment I wrote "the R-word" rather than "retarded," but this is my house, and here people can say what they actually mean, so I revised my comment:

I'm against PC restrictions on speech. I'm sometimes called retarded, and it doesn't make me fall to pieces. Technically it's incorrect to call me retarded, because I'm a high-functioning autistic with a high IQ, but to some people, I seem retarded, and that's not going to change by tabooing the word. Will it soon be taboo for people to say "autistic," will we be pressured to say "the A-word" instead? It's ridiculous. You can use each and every un-PC word on a regular basis and still be a loving, nurturing person, and you can avoid them all and still be quite hateful. If you rub shoulders with celebrity supporters of causes like the Special Olympics, you might have occasion to talk to the Farrelly brothers, who agree with me on this subject. I suspect you might not want to talk to them because of that. I hope I'm wrong, that you're not that closed-minded. You wrote: "The Medievals [sic!] were right in that words have magical power in a way that is both social and scientific." No, medieval people were completely wrong about that. That's an utterly ridiculous thing to believe. The truth is closer to the opposite: words have MORE power to hurt when we taboo them. Not less. As always in discussions about things like this, I urge you to watch Bob Fosse's movie Lenny.People who watch that movie with an open mind might learn things about the benefits of free expression and the hateful ugliness of censorship.