SOME POLITICALLY CORRECT LABELS MAKE SENSE

Columnist George Will, in his effort to support Dan Quayle’s pre-presidential campaign, referred in his March 10 column to an author who sought statistics on illegitimacy from a federal agency. . He wrote: “The Clinton administration, late to learn almost everything, still seems to disapprove of the word `illegitimacy’ more than it disapproves of what the word denotes...[The unnamed federal agency] became judgmental, saying that it preferred less judgmental locutions such as `alternate mode of parenting’ or `nonmarital childbearing.’”

Long before Dan Quayle zeroed in on the shredding fabric of family values, in the movie (circa 1941) “Blossoms in the Dust,” the whale-boned activist (circa 1900?) Portrayed by Greer Garson proclaims, “There are no illegitimate children. There are only illegitimate parents!”

It seems to me the unidentified federal agency is headed in the morally correct direction, that is, putting the onus on the parents and not on the children who through no fault of their own were born out of wedlock.

Long an admirer of George Will for his love affair with words, especially when grouped in the precise phrase, I am ticked that his need to berate the present administration blinded him to the far-reaching importance of some “politically correct” labels, especially when their importance is well known in his immediate family: George Will is the loving father of a child born with Downs Syndrome, an affliction which not too many years ago branded a child as an “Mongolian Idiot.”