You said -- "What are applauding Star Traveler for? According to deaf culture, you robbed your son of his heritage."
That's not true. Deaf parents definitely want their kids to be "normal" -- with full hearing and no handicaps like they have.
In this lady's case, she was able to successfully help her son, and any parent would want to do that.
The questions comes *after* someone tries and it's not successful and they are deaf. *Then* the question is whether they should be functioning fully in the "deaf culture" or if they should limp along in the "hearing world" with their handicap of not hearing.
If they are not able to correct their handicap, then they will forever *limp along* on the hearing world, always feeling out of place, never being part of it and never being fully integrated -- always not understanding what everyone else understands in the hearing world.
But, if they are in the deaf culture -- it's like "coming home" -- then. They will be with others who think like them, who understand like them, who perceive things in the same way as they do. It's *their culture*.
Regards,
Star Traveler
I think you two are talking past each other.
ST, you are talking about deaf people who struggle to fit in and don't want to be patronized, who live in a world that would seem very unusual or even scary to us "hearing" types, and who would likely have that 5th sense plugged in as soon as possible were it within the capablities of mmodern technology.
Papertyger is talking about a small group of radicals who seem to consume an inordinate amount of the presses attention with respect to deafness issues. They are those seem to think that deafness is a positive and to change a person from that state would be wrong. That, too, is the sense in which he compared that radicalized section of the deaf culture to the homosexual culture, though perhaps he used too broad a brush.