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Live blogging a book
Jun. 25th, 2013 02:56 pmA couple notes I wanted to make while reading Far From the Tree.
p. 17: "Much of the debate around sexual-orientation laws has turned on the idea of that if you choose homosexuality, it should not be protected, but you are born with it, perhaps it should. Members of minority religions are protected not because they are born that way and can't do anything about it, but because we affirm their right to discover, declare, and inhabit the faith with which they identify. [...] This cripple-like model of homosexuality is depressing, but as soon as ayone posits that homosexuality is chosen or mutable, lawmakers and religious leaders try to cure and disenfranchise the gay people in their purview..."
I have blogged about this before here, so it was nice to see him cover it. It's particularly nice to see the way he frames it: the defensive position is held only because of attacks by lawmakers and the religious right.
p. 5: "We often use illness to disparage a way of being, and identity to validate that same way of being. This is a false dichotomy." [Here he talks about the wave-particle dual nature of light.] "A similar duality obtains in this matter of self. Many conditions are both illness and identity, but we can see one only when we obscure the other. Identity politics refutes the idea of illness, while medicine shortchanges identity. Both are diminished by this narrowness."
It is important to remember that models are incomplete ways of describing the world. Models are developed because we are unable to fully understand the world; it is simply too complex.
Models are sometimes in opposition with each other but not always: Most disabled people use medicines and support certain charities but also rely on the social model of disability to help us understand our place in the world and world for a better standard of life.
p. 17: "Much of the debate around sexual-orientation laws has turned on the idea of that if you choose homosexuality, it should not be protected, but you are born with it, perhaps it should. Members of minority religions are protected not because they are born that way and can't do anything about it, but because we affirm their right to discover, declare, and inhabit the faith with which they identify. [...] This cripple-like model of homosexuality is depressing, but as soon as ayone posits that homosexuality is chosen or mutable, lawmakers and religious leaders try to cure and disenfranchise the gay people in their purview..."
I have blogged about this before here, so it was nice to see him cover it. It's particularly nice to see the way he frames it: the defensive position is held only because of attacks by lawmakers and the religious right.
p. 5: "We often use illness to disparage a way of being, and identity to validate that same way of being. This is a false dichotomy." [Here he talks about the wave-particle dual nature of light.] "A similar duality obtains in this matter of self. Many conditions are both illness and identity, but we can see one only when we obscure the other. Identity politics refutes the idea of illness, while medicine shortchanges identity. Both are diminished by this narrowness."
It is important to remember that models are incomplete ways of describing the world. Models are developed because we are unable to fully understand the world; it is simply too complex.
Models are sometimes in opposition with each other but not always: Most disabled people use medicines and support certain charities but also rely on the social model of disability to help us understand our place in the world and world for a better standard of life.
