From Youtube.com:

At a town hall meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, Senator Barack Obama was questioned by woman who identified herself as the mother of a child with Down syndrome who had leukemia and had undergone open heart surgery. She said her son’s name is Adam.

Q: The doctors in the hospital were commenting that I was lucky that he was getting any benefits at all, because he wasn’t really going to be anything in life. He was just going to be a dependent on everybody’s social security. My question, sir, is what are you going to do about changing the word retardation, disabled, genetically altered, for our children and for our future children, for everybody here in the United States, to make a difference in their lives, to include them, sir.

Obama: … In terms of terminology — I think the word retardation is a bad word. That’s old. We need to put that to bed …

…. I have said that as president, my goal will be to achieve full funding of special education. Because no child is disposable, every child is special, and we should make sure that we’ve got the resources in place without taking money from other children in order that they can learn and succeed and achieve their full potential. So God bless Adam. We love Adam, and thanks very much for the wonderful question.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Down syndrome, NOT2BEMISSED, funding, politics, social security, special education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post