Below is a powerful response from a man with Down’s Syndrome to Ann Coulter who recently called President Barack Obama a “retard.” He is Special Olympics athlete and global messenger John Franklin Stephens. He is also the antidote to today’s hateful political discourse.
Dear Ann Coulter,
Come on Ms. Coulter, you aren’t dumb and you aren’t shallow. So why are you continually using a word like the R-word as an insult?
I’m a 30 year old man with Down syndrome who has struggled with the public’s perception that an intellectual disability means that I am dumb and shallow. I am not either of those things, but I do process information more slowly than the rest of you. In fact it has taken me all day to figure out how to respond to your use of the R-word last night.
I thought first of asking whether you meant to describe the President as someone who was bullied as a child by people like you, but rose above it to find a way to succeed in life as many of my fellow Special Olympians have.
Then I wondered if you meant to describe him as someone who has to struggle to be thoughtful about everything he says, as everyone else races from one snarkey sound bite to the next.
Finally, I wondered if you meant to degrade him as someone who is likely to receive bad health care, live in low grade housing with very little income and still manages to see life as a wonderful gift.
Because, Ms. Coulter, that is who we are – and much, much more.
After I saw your tweet, I realized you just wanted to belittle the President by linking him to people like me. You assumed that people would understand and accept that being linked to someone like me is an insult and you assumed you could get away with it and still appear on TV.
I have to wonder if you considered other hateful words but recoiled from the backlash.
Well, Ms. Coulter, you, and society, need to learn that being compared to people like me should be considered a badge of honor.
No one overcomes more than we do and still loves life so much.
Come join us someday at Special Olympics. See if you can walk away with your heart unchanged.
A friend you haven’t made yet,
John Franklin Stephens
Global Messenger
Special Olympics Virginia
Elaine M:
Ann Coulter gets away with a lot of crap because …
*******************
… some middle aged white men think she’s cute and sassy. (Like the witless Charo or Anna Nicole Smith.) She has blonde hair and wears short skirts. She race baits, gay baits and progressive baits which all appeal the denizens of the small cesspools she inhabits. She combines sex and politics – a powerful aphrodisiac for the frustrated conservative crowd who feign propriety in public but lust in private. She’s Sarah Palin with a vocabulary!
Elaine she’s kind of pretty (well until she opens her mouth) that is about all I can think of to say something + about her
Elaine:
she called John Edwards the Breck Girl?
Malisha,
No matter how hard I rack my brain I can’t find anything “positive” to say about Ann Coulter. Maybe Enochwisner can make a “positive contribution” and inform us of all the good things that Ann Coulter has done to improve political discourse in this country.
http://www.cfc.forces.gc.ca/259/181/83_schreiber.pdf
“The New Delhi Conference ended on 6 August 1954, after setting an ambitious target date for the opening of ICSC opera-tions in Vietnam as 11August 1954, only slightly more than a week away. A scram-ble ensued in Ottawa to find personnel available to fill the slots. Some of the more senior ICSC members went directly from New Delhi to their positions in Indochina, their luggage to be forwarded once packed. The Canadian contingent required over 150 military and diplomatic personnel, 83 of these being military officers.2”
Sounds like Canadian troops were in Indochina [vietnam] to me.
@ EnochWisner,
I am better than Ann Coulter.
I can criticize her, not just because I am better than her, but because:
(a) She is a public figure and thus I can criticize her even if I’m a lot worse; and
(b) I am criticizing her NOT for who she is but for what she has done. I have no idea who she is. Why should I care? What she has done is just plain reprehensible and I call her out for it; she should be ashamed of herself but even lacks the capacity for shame.
That is one of the main reasons I am better than she is.
Ann Coulter gets away with a lot of crap because some people think she’s more intelligent and informed than she really is. Remember this?
enochwisner wrote:
“…see how many comments there are that make no pretense of positive contribution, but exist solely to tear down.”
*****
That is a perfect description of Coulter’s modus operandi. She says hateful and outrageous things about people like President Obama that she knows will bring her lots of media attention. She loves the notoriety. She deserves to be castigated for her most recent “R-word” comment about the president.
Rahm Emanuel apologized to the head of the Special Olympics after word got out that he called some liberal critics “f*cking retarded.” I wonder if Coulter will apologize for her comment.
Is using the term “Special Olympics bowler” much different?
NB: Empathy with “handicapped” does not preclude condemnation—especially those who commit base crimes; not the deranged, who are their own category to be given lifetime incarceration.
Frankly:
Actually as you well know, my inclination is toward the republican party [although much less so in recent years], so I read one of her books as I have read one of Savages books and one of Mark Levin’s books.
To tell you the truth I honestly thought I would like them, I did like some of what they had to say but for the most part they were rather intellectually shallow, even Levin’s book “Men In Black”. I was actually surprised by that because I had thought he [Levin] could have done a much better job, I could have written that book and I am not a lawyer. It was shallow like the others or maybe I should say there was nothing that made you think “now that is an interesting way to look at that”.
I dont pay much attention to them anymore.
Enoch,
Just itching to reply to you I skip from your second expression of your idea:
“I don’t expect you to believe me, but I mean it when I say that the analysis, comparison and response regarding you or any other person on these pages isn’t for me to make, but for you and them.”
The first assertion was clearer, but can’t let this one lay without AGREEING with you.
So recently as yesterday (and most days for that matter) I pointed out that the pleasure of laughing at your neighbor
is a shallow one when one should instead be comparing ones on failings instead relative to the same compass/scale/ruler.
It is a basicly daily occurence here at JT’s that at least one blog that day will enable such parades of “better than these dummers” comments. The Professor not only panders to his readers in that respect but to his own needs.
Muslims do have indeed medieval societies which history, for one, provides explanations for. But why not concentrate on correcting our sick society that at least had a sound written foundation and material resources—but which in spite of these advantages has produced Ann Coulter and millions of supporters to the detriment of our own society.
I would assert that in terms of pure percentages the number of human outrages done in muslim countries are fewer than here. Of course it is difficult to number the outrages done in a theological totalitarian society.
Should we sympathize with criminals who do terrible deeds?
Perhaps I am the only one here who would answer “yes”.
“Who shall cast the first stone” is a well-known theme from Jesus. Similarly, meny don’t know (and neither did I once) that the miracle of feeding the crowds with a few loaves and fish was not the real miracle, but the fact that Jesus got the crowd to cast off their prejudices and taboos and sit down together with strangers…..some who were publicans and some who were pharisees.
As for the “snark, laugh and run on” theme. I agree it is all too dominant here, and some use the “hot in the kitchen” defense, or correcting defective reasoning.
And as long as we have Ann Coulter, then we will have to tolerate abusers here.
Fortuntely, the abuser have other Dr Jekyll sides to them.
She does not apparently to judge purely based on this video.
But it is painful, empathetic as I am to those “handicapped” (not the young man, but the abusers here), to see people who fully believe that any behavior is theirs to use as long as they think it OK.
GeneH blog on the difference between good laws and bad laws gave a comparison between two related but different criteria: soft rule vs act….. Some here and Ann Coulter believe (if they think?) that act is their one of choice. And they see always to their benefits weighing more than the cost to others.
Equality does not exist for her. She’s a perfect example of excess braininess used for a bad cause. Goebell would have loved here. Just like he did Nini, for those who remember the films she made.
A little OT, I will finish by saying we are all (generallly) rubes. We let the foreign circus which is pointed to constantly by our “leaders”, to distract us——-instead of requiring them to fix our “circus” first.
Ignoring life threats? I think not. At least not to the point that our ills and loss of civil liberties must increase as they have with those weak threats as cause and distraction.
Bron – you have a stronger stomach than anyone I know.
I read an interesting take down on her use of footnotes. Her footnotes often led to articles that refuted rather than supported he assertions. The trick is people who are not that bright don’t read the note they simply assume it must support her point.
Politicians are pulling the same sort of stunt a lot now “Visit my website, where I explain all this in detail”. Yet when you go to the web site there is either nothing or just more glittering generalities. But, again, most people don’t bother they just believe they know what will be out there.
I thought about getting one of her books but someone had already colored in all the pictures
Ann Coulter is the poster child for nonsense and lies. Congrats to Mr. Stephens for calling her out.
I read one of Coulter’s books. In my opinion It was really not very good and full of wrong science. I havent read another one.
Frankly – Given my lifestyle (farming), I have the luxury of being as old-fashioned as I like – quaint, if you will. I don’t expect you to believe me, but I mean it when I say that the analysis, comparison and response regarding you or any other person on these pages isn’t for me to make, but for you and them.
Look, I’m no saint, and I’ve fallen below my own pretense of standards here, too. I simply try not to engage with the ones who have brought out that worst in me. I shame myself when I write on – well, forget “their” level – any level I’m not proud of.
If you’re fully satisfied in everything you’ve written in the context we’re discussing, it’s not for me to contradict you. If I ever had what I think is good reason to think you shouldn’t be that satisfied (so far, I don’t), I’ll simply stop engaging with you.
…and by all means, if I should fall below the standards of discourse we’re discussing here, please ignore me, too. I will have deserved it.