Just curious why so few people use their real names.

[deafskeptic]

213. They were very against sign language for deaf children. There's more to it though than that though.

I am not one of those who are anti speech. Few deaf are anti-speech even if their speech is not easily understood.
Even after I learned sign, I kept going to speech class until up to 10th grade. Speech teachers decided I didn't need therapy anymore. Speech class was in deaf school.

Oralism advocates speech and lip reading. Sign language is not allowed for fear it would affect speech.

I think lip reading is a useful skill but it has it pitfalls. There are few things lipreaders dread more than a toothless person. They're impossible to lipread. I've heard the many hearing have a hard time understanding their toothless people's speech. I believe it. It's also exhausting to lipread all day and I've ended up with a pretty bad headache in my face as a result.

Most deaf who grew up oral eventually become anti-oralism once they encounter the Deaf community. If I had a nickel for every orally raised deaf person saying they wished they had grown up with sign language at silent dinners, I could buy an island.

That's because using sign with others who use it is not a struggle to be understood by each other. It makes it so much easier to communicate with others. As much as I like the hearing, interacting with them in groups is difficult for me. Even interacting with 3 of them can be difficult at times.

Some extreme oralists (note that I said extreme) want to keep deaf children away from each other because of unfounded fears that they will make up homemade signs to each other and destroy their ability to speak. Some people want speech at all costs. Others are in denial.

While hearing parents want good speech and that is quite understandable. Most for the record, are not like the Horsemen.

Some in my group expressed the fear that the deaf community would disappear, hence why the parents named themselves the Horsemen.

One deaf woman in my FB group told me that deaf adults with out any language skills were put in mental institutions after they failed to develop speech and left there.

She has met quite a few of them. I've met a couple of such deaf people. It makes me angry to see an adult without any language skills at all. Such people really do exist though they are rare.

If what that deaf woman has told me is any indication; they're more common than I thought and not as rare as I had believed. The parents of those adults likely have personality disorders. I think the same is true for the Horsemen.

People tend to discount the deaf when they talk about their upbringing. I hope I won't be discounted here.

It's very difficult to explain this stuff in a few paragraphs.

It's a intense subject between the two camps.

Here's a couple of links that might help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition_by_deaf_children

http://www.deafwebsites.com/education/oralism.html