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Nevada State Sen. Robin Titus—at the time a member of its state House—received an email from a speech pathologist in rural Nevada. The pathologist and his students had noticed that the state constitution used the phrase “deaf and dumb” to describe people who were deaf or hard of hearing.
“He said, ‘Hey, this is just wrong. We shouldn’t be using this terminology anymore,’” Sen. Titus, the Nevada senate’s Republican minority leader, told me. Where people with disabilities are concerned, Sen. Titus says official language should not put “some negative connotation on what their needs are,” as such terms do.
Now that the bill has passed Nevada’s House and Senate unanimously in two consecutive sessions—a prerequisite to place an…