I have often thought that people with disabilities and people who are gay should be natural allies, even before all of the No on Proposition 8 protestsand the subsequent rallies after election day started across the nation. The protests bring back memories of ADAPT actions I've been involved with in the past. I feel that we have many shared experiences in our battles for acceptance in life. Consider how many of us grow up in, but not of, the dominant culture,and often have to look outside our families of origin for role models and inspiration. The fact that we only rarely get the guy or girl in Hollywood productions is only a bonus. Also, all kinds of people think it's icky to contemplate members of either group having sex.

I've had many amazing gay attendants, who each contributed in their own way to expanding my worldview beyond my suburban upbringing, and I owe them a great debt, as well as to many of my online friends, whose only agenda for me is that I do what makes my life better, and I'm feeling like they all got maligned on Election Day. I'm not okay with that. And, of course, many disabled people are gay, bisexual, or transgendered, and we should make it abundantly clear that anyone who tries to take their rights away has a fight with all of us. Yes, it's a pain, but just think of it as a gift-with-purchase for the time we spent together on Hitler's shit list.

A narrow, reproductively focused view of sexuality hurts us too, apart from the fact that we know how much being discriminated against across eras and cultures really sucks. But if we focus our attention exclusively on man-on-top, procreative sex(sorry if this is graphic, but this is about control, here, not the happy families eating apple pie in the commercials) sexual expression by disabled people can become trivial or even criminal.

A few years ago, when I joined a fight to defeat a measure that would have denied partnership benefits to any unmarried couple in Arizona, I was shocked to discover that the Catholic Church denied a paralyzed man the right to a church wedding, because he couldn't father children or consummate the marriage, and the Italian priest believed that's what marriage is "for,."

So, two years later, in the middle of another fight for people to love whom they wish, I find another article about another paralyzed man who is denied his own church wedding in Italy, this time in August 2008, because a priest cannot knowingly marry a woman to an impotent man, whether she is prepared for it or not. Granted, this is in Italy, which is an unabashedly Catholic nation, and I can't imagine the pluralistic United States making decisions based on canon law, despite the creepy whiff of theocracy that wafts up whenever out-of-state churches pour millions of dollars into "marriage-protection" initiatives. I think such obsession with people's private conduct is un-Christian, not only because it's judgmental, but because it interferes with worthier goals, such as feeding the hungry, for instance. Whatever happened to "Love thy neighbor,"? Well, I guess in some parishes it only counts if you can take out an ad to make sure your neighbor loves the same way you do.

Much was made by proponents of these anti-gay initiatives of how "clear" they make everything, and I suppose there is a certain simplicity in feeling that you know which category everyone belongs in, but it's often an illusion. People with disabilities should understand that people are more than we appear on the surface, and should also realize that the clear message delivered by Prop 8 and other ordinances like it is one of intolerance.

--Erika Jahneke