Chuck Schumer has sparked an outrage on the Internet by referring to mentally-disabled homeless children as a slur, r*tarted.
The Senate minority leader represents New York had been asked a question last Sunday on a podcast. The question pertained to housing in New York City in which Schumer, 70, had been discussing the complexities and difficulties of social housing. He uses the offensive term in order to describe the mentally disabled.
Schumer’s spokesperson told the Washington Examiner that “for decades, Senator Schumer has been an ardent champion for enlightened policy and full funding of services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.”
His spokesperson chimes in and says that he “used an inappropriate and outdated word in his description of an effort he supported that was led by the AHRC to build a group home in his Brooklyn district decades ago to provide housing and services to children with developmental disabilities.”
They continue “He is sincerely sorry for his use of the outdated and hurtful language.”
There are still people who have been criticizing his ill-advised phrasing. Sean Spicer, a former first press secretary of past-president Donald Trump, had shared the incident to the DailyWire story.
A user comments “WTF? Did @SenSchumer actually say r*tarded? Please tell me this is a doctored video.” Another person took note that the remark would have generated a bigger audience and bigger outrage if Trump had said it.
They mention the former president, “Hey @DonaldTrumpJr, what would the press do if your father had said this?”
Schumer’s press conference mentions that he wanted to “build, when I first was an assemblyman, they wanted to build a congregant living place for r*tarded children, and the whole neighborhood was against it”. He had apologized for the hurtful language and used it because the homeless program that he was discussing had been led by the AHRC.
The AHRC is an organization that is dedicated to fighting for people with mental disabilities and had stood for “the Association for the Help of R*tarded Children,” but have recently dropped the word from its title because of its hurtful language