The Special Olympics, now in the business of censoring the English language, has applied technology to the task with a new website, http://www.rwordcounter.org. The site allows one to enter a URL and have the site immediately searched for the offending words “retard,” and “retarded,” sort of like little teeny versions of Big Brother’s thought-police rifling through your closets and under your mattresses for bootleg copies of The Bible or Paradise Lost. Then, once the website under surveillance passes the Special Olympics Appropriate Senstitivity and Inoffensive Expression Test, it can proudly display a banner that proclaims it Clean.
Too bad the website itself is unethical, for two reasons:
1. Its purpose violates the ethical values of autonomy, fairness, tolerance, equity, openness, process, respect, and American citizenship, and
2. It is incompetent and a fraud: the damn thing doesn’t work, or at least didn’t the two times I tried it on Ethics Alarms. Apparently I could make a terrible joke here about who must have designed the site, and it would still tell me that my site was “r-word free.” I am thinking the joke, however, and hope that when the folks at the Special Olympics devise a way to detect that, as I’m certain they would love to do, their R-Word Brain Purging Unit works just as well.
Ethics Alarms 
This has reached the point of utter insanity. (Oops! Will some group find out I used THAT word… Should I now be using “sanity-deprived” or “sanity-disabled?” And if they find my reply, will “they” declare EthicsAlarms UNCLEAN?)
The Special Olympics has done wonderful things for wonderful children for decades. But I think Eunice Shriver is turning over in her grave at this point.
Soon, Galluadet University will censor the word “deaf” for “hearing impaired,” NOW will make up new words for female body parts, classic plays,books, poetry, etc. will have to be Bowdlerized (ref. Bowdler, who in Victorian times tried to edit out everything he considered “smut” in Shakespeare), police and coroner’s reports will have to be edited if they use graphic terms that some group doesn’t like, the list goes on.
This is the English language. This is a nation of free speech. See #1 in the Bill of Rights.
When and why do organizations develop the arrogance to try to change the Bill of Rights, the English language, to fit their own organization’s preferences?
Their website should be taken down on Constitutional grounds. Not only is it idiocy (uh-oh, another “unclean” word), it should be against the law.