Regular readers of Word of the Week will have seen me make this point before, but it bears repeating this week: There is no way to use the word or concept of “ableism” that is not itself ableist. Engaging in “ableism” is mentioning disability, and saying it is bad, which supposedly is what makes the lives of the disabled so hard. But it is a definitional part of the very nature of disability that it is preferable not to have one. “Ableism” is just a way of saying we must lie about disability or create a censorious norm against mentioning it. Lying and censorship are deeply antithetical to the ethos and purpose of journalism, though. For this reason, all the coverage about the supposed “ableism” in the discussion of disabled-by-a-stroke Pennsylvanian Senate candidate John Fetterman has separated journalists who uphold their own profession’s values from those who don’t.

Noting that pre-stroke Fetterman was better than post-stroke Fetterman at various cognitive tasks, including processing spoken words, is not ableist — it’s “fact-ist.” Nonetheless, according to a Buzzfeed News article about an interview Fetterman did with NBC’s Dasha Burns, “for advocates of people with permanent and temporary disabilities, the interview and the response leaned too much on Fetterman’s condition and whether he was up to the job.” A better editor would have rewritten the copy to express that these advocates are, apparently, simply advocates in favor of censorship. Is it ableist to ask, “Are you able to competently do this job that involves, among other things, authorizing the wars of the most powerful military force in human history?” Does that question stigmatize people in the midst of recovering from a stroke?