After Idaho hosted the Special Olympics World Winter Games last year, Sen. Les Bock, D-Boise, said he was startled when reading through an Idaho statute to see outmoded terminology like "mentally retarded," "mentally deficient" and even "lunatic" and "idiot." Bock said, "I think it made all of us a little more sensitive with respect to some of the language we use with regard to people with intellectual disabilities." So he asked the Legislative Services Office to do a search of state law, and found lots of such wording. Then, a half-dozen meetings followed with state Health & Welfare officials, the Idaho Council on Developmental Disabilities, the courts, the state Department of Insurance and more. In the end, Bock came up with an 82-page bill to update the wording in an array of sections of Idaho state law, from the probate code ("a decedent, an infant, lunatic or insolvent, may have...") to the death penalty ("imposition of death penalty upon mentally retarded person prohibited").

A section about "Contracts of Idiots" became "Contracts of Persons Without Understanding." A clause about vocational education programs that said "handicapped students" switched to "students with disabilities." When Bock presented the bill today to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Shirley McKague, R-Meridian, asked if it would penalize people who use the outdated terms. Bock said no; "that's not in the bill," he said. "It's not about requiring people to speak in a certain way. It's about the language in the statute."

Bock said the Special Olympics, which drew international attention to Idaho and drew hundreds of Idahoans as volunteers, opened his eyes about language referring to people with disabilities. "We shouldn't be labeling them in a way that's disrespectful," he said. Sen. Mike Jorgenson, R-Hayden Lake, noted that the long bill also, in one instance, changes the term "Afro-American" to "African-American." Bock said that was simply a matter of updating a term that's no longer in use. The bill also, in several instances, changes the word "handicapped" to "impaired," and removes the term "the mentally retarded" in favor of "people with intellectual disabilities." In all cases, Bock, a lawyer, said, "The goal was absolutely no change in the substance of the law." The Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to introduce the bill.