Fair Housing for All

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.

One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner...and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect man and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.

The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.

Now, in order to answer the question, "Where do we go from here?" which is our theme, we must first honestly recognize where we are now....Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice....Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family will live in a decent, sanitary home....Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity....Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout, "White Power!" when nobody will shout, "Black Power!" but everybody will talk about God's power and human power....And I must confess, my friends, that the road ahead will not always be smooth....[T]here will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. But difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future....

We humans with or without disabilities will never full achieve any of our legitimate goals until there is a revolution to eliminate primitive stereotypes, and to establish a culture that focuses the full force of science and democracy on the systematic empowerment of every person to live their full potential.

Everybody's journey is individual.  If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy.  The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.