Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
On the one hand, the Americans with Disabilities Act was more than a kind-hearted gesture, it was an acknowledgement that America is rich enough to be able to afford to make its public spaces accessible to everyone, including the handicapped. If the law says you have to make accommodations, then by God you have to make them; and if it takes a lawsuit to force you to comply, then you’re jerk and we don’t feel sorry for you. .
Except when the bureaucrats and building inspectors and disability lawyers get ahold of the kind-hearted gesture and turn it into a nit-picking, mountain-out-of-a-molehill tangle of impossible and conflicting regulations, compliance is not simple. The comments show how clueless the public is about the law. “It only requires that the business make the stuff from the second floor available by catalogue, or the disabled person can be met off site, and old buildings are exempted, grandfathered in.” They may be exempt until some minor change is made, then suddenly the entire place needs a major overhaul. Meet a client offsite? Portable temporary ramps? Not likely. The coffee shop with the temporary ramp will be sued because the wheelchair bound person can’t get inside to tell the store they need the ramp.
Now we’ve decided it’s time to rein in the lawsuits and make it tougher for people to force businesses to comply with the kind-hearted law.
The whole problem is another example of Liberals at play. It would feel good to do something nice for those sad victims and it doesn’t cost us anything because we’ll make somebody else pay for it, so pass the law to signal everyone how virtuous we are for Doing Good. But when people we know have to start paying real money to comply, well, that’s not so much fun anymore. Blame the nasty lawyer for bringing all the lawsuits. Make him stop forcing us to comply with our feel-good law.
It’s not so much the hypocrisy that annoys me: it’s the notion that virtue is good if it’s free; but if we have to pay for it ourselves, then it’s too much bother.
Joe Doakes
Want to start a fire? Ask a flaming committed “progressive” what they think about private charity. Hold kindling to their ears.
“‘I don’t believe in charities,” said Mayor Bernie Sanders, bringing a shocked silence to a packed hotel banquet room. The mayor, who is a socialist, went on to question the ”fundamental concepts on which charities are based” and contended that government, rather than charity organizations, should take over responsibility for social programs,’” – Sept 1981
Kel-
Obama said something similar early in his presidency.
What liberals do is look at the work that charities and volunteers do and lament that they do not control it. Charities and volunteers choose what problems to address themselves. This is anathema to central planners.
People like Sanders and Obama want the resources people voluntarily direct to charities to be controlled by themselves and people like themselves.
With liberals, it is never about charity because charity is giving something and expecting nothing in return. Liberal want power in return, power over the person receiving the ‘charity’, and power over the people who are forced to give the ‘charity’. In the liberal formula for charity, the only people who are actually acting virtuously are the Robin Hoods who steal from those with more and give to those with less.
Not enough opportunity for the government to “skim off the top” in private charities.
I’ve read that unemployment and welfare among the disabled actually increased after the ADA was passed because the law required a lot more accomodation than was typically being given to the disabled. So by mandating “reasonable” accomodation, but in the process making it an unreasonable burden, they ironically made it worse to be disabled.
That’s why the left doesn’t like real charity. They get things done and actually have a reasonable definition of “reasonable”.
Reminds me of a story about a blind man suing McDonald’s, alleging their cars-only-in-the-drive-thru policy is a violation of the ADA: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-blind-lawsuit-mcdonalds-0528-biz-20160527-story.html.