Singling out the "deficit thinkers" - who decides?

John Egbert recently posted a call to action about deficit thinkers from DeafRead.

Most people attributed his remarks as being a form of censorship. In the back of my mind I knew that John wasn't necessarily implying that we go this far. His response to the latest comments confirmed my suspicions.

John has a point, however poorly framed it might have been, to make in regards to deficit thinking, which Mike McConnell explains very well in his own blog. There are people who will post irrational blogs about certain topics, making wild accusations and sharing their own conspiracy theories. However the reality is some of those people include pro-ASL advocates as well as pro-spoken language proponents.

Perhaps John would be able to provide the best examples of deficit thinking from the anti-ASL perspective, yet there are others from the pro-ASL side that fall into the deficit thinkers category. There are a few individuals on DeafRead that do seem to convey a lot of imputations on many different subjects from the "genocide" of Deaf Culture at the hand of cochlear implants to the brainwashing of America by AG Bell.

A while back I wrote a blog about derogatory comments on the YouTube video page of "Breaking the Code." Perhaps those people who left these comments would fall under the category of deficit thinkers, yet they never were reprimanded or censored. Their words still remain to highlight the ignorance that still persists about Cued Speech. Freedom of speech at its best. We just choose to ignore them.

Whether someone is a deficit thinker depends on the person who ends up with the responsibility of making that determination. Not everyone may have the same idea of deficit thinking, creating a issue for those who want to hold a discussion on how to "remove those deficit thinkers." This is the problem with censorship. Everyone may not see everything the same way, and each person may have their own interpretations.

DeafRead has established itself as a medium to exchange ideas and facilitate dialogue, leaving much room for the exercise of one's freedom of speech. While we have the freedom of speech, we don't have the freedom to falsely accuse people and make unsubstantiated claims. This everyone should agree on.

Both the public and the editors of DeafRead have the responsibility to single out those who dishonestly misrepresent themselves and publish libel and slander. Anything else may be considered freedom of speech, unless otherwise determined specifically by the editors of DeafRead. After all those human editors do make their own judgments as to what gets onto DeafRead.

I see no need to remove "deficit thinkers" from the website if the DeafRead editors allow them there in the first place.