Listen to the Voices of Disability Discrimination

Most of the media coverage I heard on the ADA 20th anniversary represented the civil rights law as a landmark in American public life. There were dissenting views, of course. Someone hiding behind the name “fortressdayton” wasted little time in adding this comment to my op-ed piece on the Dayton Daily News Matter of Opinion blog. Disability discrimination is often hard to put your finger on, so I give “fortressdayton” credit for being unfiltered, if mean-spirited:

By fortressdayton

The original author of the ADA, a man confined to a wheelchair, lamented what the ADA has become. He said that, had he known what abuses of personal and property rights would take place in the name of the act, he would never have written the Act. How’s that for a commentary on the ADA? Society had a responsibility to TRY to accomodate its less-gifted citizens, but it is not obliged to do so. The ADA is a legal boondoggle used by attorneys to generate lucrative lawsuits. It needs to go away. Look around Dayton and see how this works out: every corner nearly has a sight-impaired plastic plate. How many sight impaired folks walk around Dayton? The cost is criminal. Braille buttons on drive-thru (!) ATMs. Gimme a break. Thye ADA has put more small restaurants out of business than the Mafia and the economy combined. Why does a mom and pop restaurant need a ramp and a handicapped accessible bathroom for EACH sex? Nonsense. Every welfare recipient seems to have a power chair now, so the problem is epidemic. I say, stop over-regulating in the private sector. If I don’t want to spend 200,000 to make my restaurant handicap-accessible, then that should be my decision. If you accomodate one, then you must, by rights accomodate all. Why do we get to bring assistance animals in food service establishments? What happened to hygiene? Oh, that’s right…the blind have more of a right to bring Fido in than I have a right to maintain food safety. BS!

After reading that, I was ready to reply in kind – but didn’t. Other commenters jumped into the fray, renewing my conviction in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s assertion that the best remedy for speech that we hate is not its proscription, but more speech. Read what they wrote.

The libertarian argument (I’ve got mine, and I’ll step on your neck to keep it) advanced by “fortressdayton” reminded me of Rand Paul’s remarks about the Americans with Disabilities Act after his primary election victory last May in Kentucky. His language sounded reasonable compared to “fortressdayton”, but it conveyed the same sense of paternalism and noblesse oblige: the disabled  don’t need burdensome laws to help them, we know what is best for them. Here is what Rand Paul said on NPR:

I think a lot of things could be handled locally. For example, I think that we should try to do everything we can to allow for people with disabilities and handicaps. You know, we do it in our office with wheelchair ramps and things like that. I think if you have a two-story office and you hire someone who’s handicapped, it might be reasonable to let him have an office on the first floor rather than the government saying you have to have a $100,000 elevator. And I think when you get to solutions like that, the more local the better, and the more common sense the decisions are, rather than having a federal government make those decisions.