Some of the different hats I wear in my life don't always compliment each other very well. Even though I hate the R Word with the zealotry of a late convert, I'm also a writer, and I don't take the cudgel against language without real hesitation. But as a writer, I have to accept that words have actual power, and when we use them, we have responsibility for the outcome. The concept of hate speech results from the acknowledgement that powerful things sometimes need to be checked. I'd prefer that in this particular case, the checks would be self-applied, and that simply basic humanity would lead you to look at a language containing approximately 1,025,110 words and pick one that didn't cause so much pain to a particularly vulnerable population. I'm not for banned language, as a rule. But I recognize that hate speech occupies a very particular place in our culture, and our response to it is especially important.
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