Oh, please. The only PERTINENT question is whether the actor playing the character in the wheelchair did a credible job of it. Listen, when a wheelchair bound actor auditions for and ultimately plays a role that wasn’t written as a wheelchair bound character THAT’s the victory!!! And these sort of victories ARE happening all the time! These days we have actors who happen to be female playing roles that were written for males. Actors of “color” playing roles that were written, ahem, *colorlessly*. Are these things happening often enough, probably not. But that’s where we should be putting our activist efforts. Not into locking ourselves into a casting ghetto.

Or we should go further and demand that male writers mustn’t be allowed to write for women and vice versa. Damn that Shakespeare!!! How dare he write about a Moor and his white wife??!!! Whoever he actually was (Marlowe, Bacon or Himself) he certainly was neither a Moor nor a woman. Surely you will join me in denouncing it a travesty that he was permitted to write about something he had not personally experienced. And what a disgraceful hack job he did of it?! Fortunately he was not permitted to write of Jews – oh, wait, he DID, didn’t he? And, ahem, rather poignantly. Still, though, he shouldn’t have been permitted to do so. What a slap in the face of the Jewish community of Elizabethan Southwark?! Happily we are ever so much more wise and sensitive these days.

Sigh. Shoot the enemy, sweet things, not your own feetes. HELLLLOOOO!???!

Whatever happened to being grateful for blessings where you find them? Glee has a primary cast member who is disabled, and even has an episode that highlights this to teach the other characters what it is like to BE in a wheelchair.

Are people grateful about this? No! Instead, they choose to bitch and moan because the actor portraying the character is not actually disabled.

Grow up people and count your blessings. Instead of making the most out of something positive you have now just made yourselves look like utter fools, and completely ungrateful ones at that. The whole point of being an actor is portraying characteristics that you, yourself, don’t have. The flip side of that is that some characters will be played by people who (gasp!) aren’t actually of the type portrayed! This does not, in any way conceivable, lessen the meaning of the character – it simply is what it is.

Shame on you. Sour grapes for not getting the role should not trump a truly momentous moment in network history.