We see people of kindness, compassion, and possibly even faith being told, “Because of a characteristic with which you were born, you are evil and bad.” Anything that even implies such a stance is profoundly toxic.
Treating an identity as an illness invites real illness to make a braver stand.
I don’t accept subtractive models of love, only additive ones. And I believe that in the same way we need species diversity to ensure that the planet can go on, so we need this diversity of affection and diversity of family in order to strengthen the ecosphere of kindness.
Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle.
Science still won’t explain the mysterious nature of love and despair.
One of the things that frequently gets lost in descriptions of depression is that the depressed person often knows that it is a ludicrous condition to feel so disabled by the ordinary business of quotidian life.
Our needs are our greatest asset. It turns out I’ve learned to give all the things that I need.
I just look at my own life, which is full of error as all life is. I have done plenty of things that I am not proud of.
Kids with Down syndrome are, by and large, quite affectionate and relatively guileless, and frequently, the attachments to them grow and deepen. And the meaning that parents find in it grows and deepens.
I like the relative literacy of at least some of England. I mean, I didn’t come for the food or the weather!
The strengthening of faith, I think, is the ultimate goal of organized religion altogether.
Living with depression is like trying to keep your balance while you dance with a goat – it is perfectly sane to prefer a partner with a better sense of balance.
Any community that remains an abstraction is an easy target for prejudice and cruelty, but any community that becomes fully humanized is much harder to treat in that way.
I found it very comforting to see that there is no such thing as a completely normal family. People find their way through whatever the differences may be.
I spent years thinking I had to make a choice between being true to myself and being with a man and not having a family, and trying to live something of a lie and being with a woman and having children...
I had always wanted to have children, so it caused me a lot of grief when I was younger, and I had supposed that gay people could not be parents.
I was in fact anxious about whether I would be any good at being a father. And then I met so many people who had been good parents under difficult circumstances, and I felt inspired by them.
Parenthood always involves recognizing your child as separate and different from you.
And I found out about the wonderful world of sign language. I suddenly realized: If we as a society recognize Jewish culture, gay culture and Latino culture, we must recognize that this is a coherent culture, too. I think deafness is a disability for social constructionist reasons.
I think you can’t deny that because the cochlear implant exists, the signing world is shrinking.