Thank you for sharing these thoughts with all of us. It’s very encouraging to me; I will be reading and reflecting and learning as well and it’s helpful to know that there are others who feel the same way.

Melissa, especially, b/c i really really needed to hear that just now. there are a lot of issues involved, some that i really don’t want to post in an open forum like this, but things that marriage would solve for us…and it has been really heavy on my heart and conscience. thank-you.

Oro and Pizza, thank-you, you said exactly what i was going to when i got home from work. i think disabled people don’t want to be pitied, who does? but they deserve to be considered in things like being able to enter public buildings and go to pubs like everyone else. on my bad days, two or three stairs are almost more than i can handle. on good days, i try to be very conscious of the world the way i saw it on the bad days. does that make sense?

I had to struggle with the marriage issue, too. Because Iain is British, and because neither of us had a job that made us suitable for work visas, the only way we could be together was if we got married. I had some serious angst about that for the same reasons; when I mentioned it to my best friend Todd and his then-partner of more than a decade, they just laughed in disbelief. They couldn’t believe I’d even thought about it that way. Todd’s response was, approximately: “Your consideration of our inequality will make more of a difference toward our getting equality than your not marrying Iain would.” Which was very generous of him — and I think good guidance in must-do situations like yours or mine.

If I hadn’t had to get married, I wouldn’t have. But I did guarantee one more eventual vote for marriage equality by marrying him, too!

J19, the better reaction is a form of privilege. A quiet, hidden form of privilege is just being treated as normal and not having to think about things constantly because you and I are able-bodied. It’s not having to think about things such as “does this building have an elevator?” (something I wondered about when I was apartment hunting–I looked at six different buildings and every single one had a flight of stairs from the street to the entrance, and no ramp.)

I think that, and your efforts to read widely and educate yourself, are important first steps. The biggest barrier that I’ve found in talking to people in RL about sexism, heterosexism, and poverty, is that they’re unwilling to be self-reflective and examine their own privileges when they make mistakes. A willingness to read and listen may not seem like much, but they’re the foundation on which everything else is built.

I’ve been trying to read more widely and especially read WOC lately, too, because I want to know more and I want to be involved. I’m second-generation Korean and so their fight is my fight–I’ve just been insulated from it by class privilege. Reading doesn’t seem like much on face, but I’ve found that it’s the gateway to activism in the real world: blogswarms, writing letters, contacting representatives, finding volunteer opportunities I never knew existed.