In recent weeks one of the local stories in the news has been about an ADA lawyer being sued by his employees for a variety of offenses. The news has brought a little schadenfreude to those long tired of his abuse of the laws deigned to protect the disabled
He is well known for “suing” businesses by claiming that they are not accessible to the handicapped but quickly settles when they basically pay him off. As part of the lawsuit his employees have stated that he often would not even go into the places that he sued.
Indeed the problem is so bad that the state recently passed a law to deal with it.
Now of course we should require reasonable efforts on the part of businesses. We don’t want to go back to the days of no wheelchair access where the disabled were second class citizens. But at the same time I think we have to be reasonable about things.
A while back there was a case where a man sued White Castle because their booths were too small. Now aside from the obvious jokes about weight and eating at White Castle the case prompts the question of how far we should go to help those in need. In the case of White Castle they reportedly offered to provide chairs for customers who could not fit into normal booths. That seems a reasonable compromise to me, or at least a step in the right direction.
Just in case you want to brand me as not understanding the issue of weight and/or other disabilities, I am well versed in the topic. A close family member was quite overweight and it was simply something we dealt with. If we went out to eat we sometimes had to wait extra time for a table because he could not fit in a booth. I am sure when he went to the doctor he sometimes had to go through extra stuff due to his weight.
Similarly, I have close friends who are confined to wheelchairs and when we go out to places sometimes we have to wait for a place to sit or are unable to access certain areas. When we go to an amusement park sometimes you can’t get on a certain ride or into an older area of the park. We just deal with that.
In other words in both cases we do/did expect places to make reasonable accommodations for the problems we faced. If they provided no way for us to get into the business or if they were rude about things then we quite properly complained. But if you just were not able to access area B but could access Area A, we tried to be reasonable.
To be sure in the past this was more of a problem when places did little or nothing to provide access and it was quite proper for activists to protest and seek redress. But today it seems like everybody expects everyone else to bend to whatever their needs are no matter how much it costs.
I myself have vision problems and bad coordination. As a result I was the nerdy kid who stunk at sports and now I am the dorky adult who stinks at sports.
Should local intramural leagues be forced to let me play even though I am not very good ? Should I get to stand closer to the basket or be off limits to being tackled so I can do better? If I go to a ring toss game should I get to stand closer than everyone else?
The answer is of course NO. I am not as good at these things and it’s just something I have to accept and something I’ve dealt with my whole life. Obviously this is a minor issue compared to those with real disabilities and they do, of course, deserve some accommodations. But people also have to accept that not everyone gets to do everything.