Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - The treatment of disabled in today's society

smooth · 12-22-2004, 04:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr Mephisto

Hey smooth.

I owe you a PM. Just got back from a lengthy business trip...

No, a few people said that disabled people should not be treated any differently, or complained about political correctness.

I'll say it again, people are missing the point. And that is, disabled people SHOULD be treated differently. They should be shown understanding, compassion, welcomed into the community, shown they have value (both personal and to society).

That's why I have reacted to what I see as a petty and incompassionate response to this story. Good grief, the people invovled directly can see the point. The only ones defending this priest's actions are a few on this board! Not his parishoners, not his colleagues and not his direct superior.

I'm not labeling anyone anything. I said that acting compassionately towards the disabled is not political correctness, but it is human decency. And this is something that some people here are lacking; or so their responses would imply.

I have absolutely no problem with a priest asking for a deliberately disruptive person to leave a church. Of course they should be allowed to do this.

But for a priest to remove someone mentally handicapped, who is self-evidently being integrated into society, who is being brought to church to pray, who is in a place of Christian worship, for praying too loudly?

That's just fucking wrong.

My original intent, repeated a couple of times, was to talk about the trend. However, the thread has evolved into a back-lash against perceived PC sensibilities when the incident is no such thing. I have simply responded to what I believe are incompassionate (dare I say unChristian) comments.

But obviously this priest acted inappropriately. I never said they shouldn't allowed to remove someone, but not in this manner and most importantly, not in this circumstance.

You're being flippant. Of course they were livid about the removal. Reread the story and the context in which the unreserved apology was given.

We are all capable of reserving our opinions and emotions. But that doesn't mean you don't express them when, and if, you feel it's appropriate. I have seen you comment negatively about other topics.

Mr Mephisto

Yes, I guess my entire post could have been summed up like this:

My capacity to reserve judgement on a particular incident shouldn't be read by you as a lack of common human decency.

The two posts above your first response actually agreed that the priest seemed to have gone too far, but also that they didn't have enough information to really make a strong assertion.

The post directly above your third response (from Shakran) was trying to reconcile the feelings of a community (an affected congregation) with those of an individual.

In between all of that it looked to me like people were not defending this priest, but rather a priest's ability or right to eject someone from the service to end a disturbance.

So I was hoping for you to reevaluate how you are viewing many of those posts as they don't seem to be heartless or inhuman as you're feeling when you walk away after reading them.

Bones: I don't know if we would all agree upon "The" line, but I think your post is evidence that everyone is operating with some kind of line of exemptable disruptions. That is, your examples are would 'this' be ok (but not that, since that is pretty universally unacceptable; what about 'this,' but not straight up sex in the pews; what about 'this,' but we all would presumably agree that being drunk and grabbing the lady in front of you on the ass or tits would be proper grounds to eject your drunk ass...).

I hope you see my point, because I haven't found that when I come back and repeat myself that much gets solved so I'll probably just watch this thread from here on out.