All aboard the Fat Parade.

Short post this week and next, as I'm about to go on vacation, but I wanted to share this awesome article. 

No one is free while others are oppressed -- Unknown.

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.  ~Abraham Lincoln

I can across the first quote when I was in a feminist group in college. At the time for me, it meant women's rights and freedoms, but now it expands to even more, I don't feel happy or free while people get treated like second class citizens. 

Marilyn Wann has a great article in the San Francisco Weekly about intersectionality which is  about people who come from  different social oppessed groups. (i.e. female and African-American)  and how instead of having separate causes, we have one big fat one. 

Instead of making long lists of outsider groups who deserve long-overdue welcome and then debating who's deserving and who isn't, what if we were all welcome all the time?

I'm all with Marilyn on this one. Oppression is oppression, even if some have it worse than others. 

Sometimes I think society at large doesn't consider fat prejudice oppression. After all weight is fluid, it changed artificially or through illness. If they just lose weight it will no longer be a problem. But this has nothing to do with whether weight loss works or not (for the most part, it does not work in the long run) but it has to do with the right of a person to not be discriminated against because they go against the "norm." It's not fair that a fat person goes to the doctor, job interview, applies for health insurance, life insurance, etc and they are immediately labelled unhealthy and lazy. If you removes rights from a person, for being who they are, then you are denying their freedom.

Everyone needs to join one big parade to accept that people are different and that should be valued not shunned.