The House of Delegates on Wednesday rejected an attempt to remove the words “mental retardation” from a bill that seeks to appropriate $30 million to a special fund to move residents of the state’s training centers into community-based housing.
Del. Robin Abbott, D-Newport News, asked legislators to change the phrase “mental retardation” to read “intellectual and developmental disabilities.”
“These words are very damaging and hurtful and there is no excuse for them to be in our code today,” Abbott said.
House members rejected Abbott’s request, not because members liked the term “mental retardation,” but because those words already appear in many places in the state code.
Del. Dave Albo, R-Fairfax County, said legislators almost removed “mental retardation” from the code with a 2008 bill, but the change wasn’t made because Virginia didn’t want to risk losing federal funds that might be designated to assist with “mental retardation” in the federal code.
Earlier this week, state senators also questioned use of the term “mental retardation” in their version of the funding legislation.
Bill Hazel, state secretary of health and human services, told the senators on Monday that he, too, had noticed the code’s references to “mental retardation.”
“Those terms are archaic and obsolete,” Hazel said, but his department decided to use them in this year’s bill so it would be consistent with other sections of the state code.
“Next year’s job is to clean up all of those terms,” Hazel told the senators.
Several House members said they, too, would like to consider changing the code’s references next year.
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