Atonement for Denis Leary

[Guest guest]

Following is an US magazine statement from Denis Leary statement where he acknowledges autism & how it has affected dear friends of his, how his comment was taken out of context, and how he has "nothing but admiration and respect for parents dealing with the issue, including the ones I know."

Regardless, About.com had a recent article about how we (the autism community) may be making ourselves a teasing target by creating an uproar everyime somebody makes an offhand deragatory comment. Afterall, isn't this the advice we are told to give our children if they are teased? (If you ignore such comments, you won't be fun to tease anymore; however if you act overly upset, you are giving the bully what they want) (Is this where the word "bullseye" comes from????))

Can you imagine the fodder that would be created if, for example, every minority group or even groups such as "weight watchers" drew mass media attention to every comedian's insulting joke? Can you imagine the fiasco if Leary's "Let's make a bong out of Barry Manilow's head" joke caused Manilow's agents to draw media attention. (I don't know, maybe Leary had to get prior approval to talk about Barry Manilow's head in such a smoky way)

Leary is a sarcastic pr*ck and a self-proclaimed a**hole.

I'm glad he "made right" anyway, because I love him:

Leary tells Us in a statement:

The people who are criticizing the "Autism Schmautism" chapter in my new book Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid clearly have not read it.

Or if they have, they missed the sections I thought made my feelings about autism very clear: that I not only support the current rational approaches to the diagnoses and treatment of real autism but have witnessed it firsthand while watching very dear old friends raise a functioning autistic child.

The point of the chapter is not that autism doesn't exist - it obviously does - and I have nothing but admiration and respect for parents dealing with the issue, including the ones I know.

The bulk of the chapter deals with grown men who are either self-diagnosing themselves with low-level offshoots of the disease or wishing they could as a way to explain their failed careers and troublesome progeny.

Taking one or two sentences out of context - especially when it involves an entire chapter devoted to the subject - is unfair and ill-advised.

Too often in this country, everything gets reduced to simple sound bites and very very often those sound bites are not truly representative of an author or artist’s point of view.

Please give me the benefit of the doubt by reading all of what I wrote before attacking me