When an alarm system is disabled, it doesn’t work. I resent being called disabled. I work.
I am a handicapped man. I was born with one leg and a total of 3 deformed fingers. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) advocates don’t like it when I say “handicapped” and “normal.” That’s one reason I say them. Of course, they also don’t like the fact that I type 45—50 words per minute, rollerblade, and tell the truth about the ADA.
Political correctness was designed for two reasons:
- To use it against people for financial gain, such as the ADA-related psychologists, psychiatrists, lawyers, and bureaucrats who make their fortunes off backs that they cripple.
- To create victims out of folks who were not victims before the ADA. As Walter K. Olson so accurately says, we didn’t want to be seen as victims!
Political correctness is not something cute that we can shrug off as some lefty’s pet. Political correctness is deadly. Nowhere is political correctness more deadly than the Americans with Disabilities Act. Consider the deaf person who recently sued for not being hired as a lifeguard. The managers of the beach were concerned that the deaf person may not hear drowning screams for help. The ADA lawyers didn’t care. To the ADA, life and death issues take a back seat when it comes to justifying their jobs.
The ADA increases discrimination against the handicapped. I can prove it but that’s not my purpose here. My purpose here is to show the ADA’s cost to normal people.
If you’re normal, here are ten ways the ADA harms you (it was difficult narrowing down the huge list to only ten items):
- The next time your kids go swimming, how comfortable will you be knowing that the ADA wants the managers of that pool or beach to hire a deaf lifeguard if one applies?
- You pay higher prices in stores for everything you buy to purchase new ramps, faucets, doors, parking signs, revamped parking lots, converted counter heights, light switches, phones, toilets, sinks, stalls, and even the wider aisle widths required which cut down on the amount of merchandise store owners can sell.
- You pay higher prices for the business owners who must defend themselves or settle out of court when they are sued under the ADA for their formerly-legal hiring practices and who faithfully followed legal building codes that were afterwards tossed out by the ADA.
- You pay higher prices as a taxpayer when the Department of Justice and the EEOC brings many of these suits to court. See, the public pays both sides of an ADA lawsuit: the side of the defendant and the side of the plaintiff who is often the United States Government. You lose. (No matter which side wins, the lawyers always seem to be paid…)
- You pay higher ticket prices at the movies. Not only are theatres being sued to put wheelchair seating in higher and more central locations in the large auditoriums, they are having to install elevators as well. Not only are multiple seats being removed to make way for wheelchair spaces that may or may never be used, some seats are being widened to make way for the disabled fat people suing under the ADA because they cannot fit in normal seats. Fewer seats available mean fewer tickets sold mean higher prices for you mean more lawsuits for other businesses mean more ADA activist profits.
- You pay the moral and ethical degradation when retroactive laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act pass. Retroactive laws are harmful; they ensure that you cannot count on today’s building codes being legal tomorrow and you cannot count on the justice system to protect you ever in the future.
- You pay the court costs associated with the government buildings that are still being sued today in 2004 because they don’t conform to the ADA’s accessibility building codes. That’s right, the government started requiring – then suing – private businesses to conform to the draconian ADA building standards they themselves designed without first changing all their own front doors. “Leading by example” is not a term familiar to most government leaders. Actually, saying “government leaders” gives the term “leader” a bad name.
- You pay cost in lost time as you walk by row after row of empty wheelchair parking spaces to get to the front door of any American business. The government knows best how many spaces a business owner needs to allocate for disabled parking. The business owner doesn’t get a say in the matter. It presupposes that the government knows every business owner’s clientele far better than the business owner himself… that’s why you so often see row after row of empty wheelchair spaces and every normal space overflowing.
- Round doorknobs are illegal in the United States of America. (You didn’t know that, did you?) Commercial establishments will be shut down if they refuse to change from round door knobs to levered ones.
- Do you have a wheelchair symbol painted on your driveway? If not, you might soon. The ADA is coming to your neighborhood! Already some neighborhoods are being required to build houses that meet accessibility standards. You might as well buy the blue paint now before the rush.
May 15, 2004
