Jeremiad  

Disabling the Handicapped

by Greg Perry

How the Americans with Disabilities Act kicks away the crutches from the differently abled.

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My name is Greg Perry and I am a handicapped man.

I was born with only one leg and a grand total of three deformed fingers. I am currently walking around on an artificial leg although I've had to resort to crutches several times in the past. I've also been confined to wheelchairs before. It all depends on the state of my leg and how I'm doing at the time.

But I'm glad that I was born long before 1990, when a much more severe handicap — the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) — was signed into law. If I'd been born afterwards, I would not be writing this. I probably would not be what many consider to be a huge success today. I would not be married. I would be a loser on the government dole.

I am not saying everybody who benefits from the ADA is a loser, but I know myself. I know that in my high school years if anybody had offered me any excuse to get out of work — to get a government paycheck and become a victim — I would have taken it. I was a typical lazy teenager who thought the world owed him; with the incentives offered by the ADA, I would have been willing and able to be as disabled as I needed to be so that I wouldn't have to work for my grades or anything else.

Besides costing every normal person money and grief, the ADA not only increases discrimination against the truly handicapped, it teaches them to be dependent when they could be independent otherwise.

I am not sure that I would even have been born if the Americans with Disabilities Act had been enacted while my mom was pregnant. Some government social worker might have called after my mom's sonogram showed that I would be born with one leg and three stubby fingers and tried to convince her that I would have no shot at a healthy, productive life. That is typical of ADA fans: they often encourage abortion for handicapped children.

My mother was a school teacher, and when I was 4 she did what many public school teachers used to do — she taught me how to read and write. About the same time, my father did what good fathers do — he bought me a baseball, a bat, and a glove. He took me outside and handed me the bat. He then walked away. He turned, told me to get ready, and tossed the ball to me. I used the bat to hit the ball. Then I put on the baseball glove. My father tossed me the ball. I caught the baseball. I threw it back to him.

Obviously, my father was smarter than the psychologists, lawyers, and bureaucrats who make their fortunes off lives crippled by the ADA. My father didn't assume I couldn't hit a baseball. He figured that if I could, I would; and if I couldn't, there were plenty of other things in life to keep me busy. He didn't try to rig some strap contraption to the bat, he just let me see what I could do. If I had needed a strap or some other device, he would have been the first to get it for me. But he didn't start off assuming I needed help. Later, he tossed me a football and I kicked it. Far! I was an incredible punter growing up. I can imagine today's ADA police ushering my father into sensitivity training for buying his one-legged, three-fingered little boy a baseball bat and football! Wouldn't buying me those harm my self-esteem?

The government schools today teach that a child's self-esteem is the most important part of learning. That seems backwards to me. Being able to read street signs and billboards as your family drives past them when you're 4 years old, or reading books to your neighborhood friends who can't read yet, or hitting a baseball and catching it and running around imaginary bases in your yard — that instills a lifetime of self-esteem that otherwise wouldn't have been there. Bear with me for one more example.

When I was 7 years old, my parents bought me a typewriter for Christmas. I imagine today's ADA police might send my parents to prison for buying me that typewriter! What a blow to my self-esteem. Wouldn't buying me a typewriter, considering my digital deficit, be as cruel as, I don't know . . . as buying a 4-year-old one-legged boy a football to kick?

But look at the result of that gift. I am recognized as the most prolific author on earth about a very broad subject: all forms of computer technology. My books about computers have been published by major houses and translated into every major language in the world. Without that typewriter, I would not have taken to the keyboard as I did. My entire career would have been destroyed before it ever began, and almost 100 books wouldn't have been written and sold worldwide. I might very well be a loser today if some ADA psychologist had warned my parents not to buy me such stupid items.

Businesses that built their buildings and storefronts long before the ADA was passed had to conform, no matter the cost. Retroactive laws mean no one can ever count on protection from the justice system. They are unjust, plain and simple.

If retroactivity were the only thing wrong with the ADA, it would be a huge problem — but that's its least important problem. All the other harm it has done is what truly makes it dangerous.

Consider a small-business owner who runs a family-owned coffee shop. He's struggling to survive his first few years just, like any other small-business owner in America. Before the ADA, if anybody came up to his coffee shop's front door on crutches or in a wheelchair, that business owner would have gone out of his way to leave the order counter, help with a menu, and bring items to the table — even if it meant forsaking other customers who were in line earlier — to help that person enjoy a quality experience. Compassion overflows in America when someone truly needs help. His assistance would make every other customer in that shop happy, even if it cost them some time.

But after the signing of the ADA in 1990, that business owner was told that he had to change every door, switch, aisle, faucet, toilet, sink, countertop, chair, sign, parking space, ramp, and so on. If he didn't, he would lose his business and possibly go to jail. After being required by law to spend $10,000, $25,000, maybe more than $100,000 to change all those things, the next time that a handicapped person wheels up to the front door, will that business owner view him with compassion, with a desire to help?

Quite the opposite. The owner will view that person with disdain. He will think, "I've been forced to spend as much as $100,000 for you by law — so now you're equal! If you need help, there's a grab bar. Help yourself!"

If you want to help a little old lady cross the street, that's good. It's an act of compassion. But what if a policeman puts a gun to your head and demands that you walk her across the street? That is coercion. Coercion destroys compassion! The more coercion our laws create, the less compassion Americans will have for each other.

We've seen time and time again how welfare teaches family and friends not to help each other. The ADA teaches America not to have compassion.

The ADA was supposed to stop discrimination against the handicapped — but people weren't kicking crutches out from under crippled people before the ADA became law. People weren't pushing folks in wheelchairs into traffic! It took the ADA to bring about discrimination against the handicapped.

I despise the politically correct term disabled. I prefer the term handicapped. When an alarm system is disabled, it doesn't work. But when a watered-down word such as disabled is used instead of the more accurate term handicapped, the law can be used against far more people, and far more people can take advantage of the ADA.

Take the dentist who was caught sexually molesting his patients: his defense was that he should be considered disabled under the ADA because he had a compulsion he couldn't help. Even the most unscrupulous lawyer would be hesitant to say the dentist was handicapped because that would be obviously ludicrous. Yet, when he could use the term disabled, he could get away with defending the criminal. When you use disabled instead of handicapped, you've got some wiggle room in the American law system!

If you weren't disabled before the ADA, you are now. You pay higher costs for every single thing you do. You pay as a customer when a business owner makes physical building changes that can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of bucks, or when a business owner is taken to court under the often false pretense of discriminating against the handicapped. You pay as a taxpayer when the government takes businesses to court for violating the ADA — which happens all the time. You pay both the defendant's and the plaintiff's costs, fees, and damage awards! As an American customer and taxpayer . . . you lose!

The ADA snares employers in a Catch-22. A business owner is not allowed to ask about any disabilities when hiring, and if he doesn't hire someone who is handicapped, that owner faces a discrimination lawsuit. But if he does hire a handicapped person, and the employee needs some costly device to do the job because of the handicap — perhaps something like special amplifying equipment for all the phone headsets — that employee doesn't have to mention that until after being hired! And if the employer refuses, the employee returns with an EEOC or Department of Justice lawyer.

In 1990, I thought about going to Washington to campaign against this farce when Congress was discussing it because I knew it would be horribly misused, cost America far more than estimated, and end up causing more problems for those who were truly handicapped. I decided not to go. I had severely underestimated the ADA; I still kick myself. (And believe me, kicking myself is a challenge!)

A slogan a few decades ago read, "Hire the handicapped!" and it worked. You'd see those signs in the workplace. People actually hired us!

The dumbest business owner in the world is smarter than the smartest person in Congress. And business owners rightly thought, "Hey, if this person has overcome some disability and is capable of doing the job, then this is a person I want to hire! By overcoming adversity, he or she shows a fortitude that goes above and beyond that of normal people without that problem."

But ADA advocates speak out of both sides of their mouths. They tell us that people with disabilities are to be treated as though they have no disabilities. Try building a parking lot without wheelchair ramps and see how they like you treating the handicapped as though they were just like everybody else. The ADA says employers can't ask about the needs of the disabled because this is discriminatory. Then after being hired, the disabled person can bring up a pile of problems — problems that the employer must deal with at considerable expense. How equal is that?

Disability advocates state that you should never mention the fact that a disabled person overcame their disability to do something great. That doesn't make sense to me. Beethoven went deaf, but it didn't stop him from composing some of the greatest musical works ever! But they've scolded me for mentioning that, and said that it's akin to telling a black man that he is a credit to his race — as if they've never used a black or handicapped person to further their own agenda.

What about the world's most famous physicist, Stephen Hawking? He can't walk, he basically can't move his body from the neck down. He can't even talk. The only thing he can do is blow through a straw — and he's used that straw to develop arguably the most important sets of theories in modern physics. But we're not supposed to mention that from the neck down, Stephen Hawking is helpless.

ADA advocates say it's bad to point out these differences. Yet the ADA advocates point out the differences between normal and handicapped people all the time! I'm sick and tired of being reminded that I'm handicapped when I drive down any street, passing 200 wheelchair parking signs on every building, door, and parking lot. According to the ADA police, they can say I'm different but you'd better not!

In government schools, disabilities bring big bucks. The more kids they can label disabled, the more money they get from the taxpayers. No wonder they find more and more disabled kids all the time. As they move from phonics to a whole language reading approach, more kids can't read; therefore, they're legally disabled! More bucks flow out of taxpayer pockets into the government school system.

Teachers no longer discipline students, so many students now have to be drugged into submission. And if a kid needs drugs, he must be disabled. They can use that disabled label for so much. If schools were retail stores, Disabled would be a key on the cash register.

Linda Shrock Taylor writes about how special-education teachers are often not allowed to transfer special-ed kids into normal classes even when the teachers feel the children have overcome whatever put them there. Why? If special-education kids were allowed to go back into the regular curriculum, the extra money would go away.

Before she married me, my wife Jayne taught special ed for two years. She tells me they wouldn't allow the special-ed kids to take the same standardized tests the other kids took. I'm not big on standardized tests, don't get me wrong, but this is really a gem: they wouldn't allow special-education students to take the tests the normal students took because the school's test average would fall and parents wouldn't want to send their kids to that school.

You must understand that almost every parent thinks that his or her kid's school is the best. Every parent in America says, "Yes, the schools have a lot of problems but my kid's school is fine." But the schools know that if they don't hide their special-ed problems, the parents will pull their kids out and the money will stop flowing. This is all done with the ADA seal of approval, by the same people who say that you can't separate handicapped people in any way from society.

Political correctness is not just some cute thing from the Left that we can wink at — it can be deadly. Consider the deaf person who recently filed a discrimination lawsuit for not being hired as a lifeguard. The managers of the beach were concerned that the deaf person may not hear screams if someone started drowning or got hurt in the water and others yelled for a rescue. The beach's managers didn't think he would make a very effective lifeguard, but the ADA lawyers that he came back with said: "No, he will be your lifeguard." ADA lawyers don't care. To supporters of the ADA, psychologists, and lawyers, life and death issues are less important than justifying their jobs. The next time your kids go swimming, how comfortable will you be knowing that the ADA might require the managers of that pool or beach to hire deaf lifeguards?

It would be wrong for me to tell my neighbor to widen his doors for those times when I'm in a wheelchair, or remove his steps for when I use my crutches — so why is it okay for me to demand that he make all those changes at his street-corner coffee shop? Either way, I am stealing from him! When the government forces him to make changes that he doesn't see the need for, he is being robbed.

If a business doesn't want to change their fixtures to make it easier for me to do business with them, maybe they just don't have the money to do it. Or maybe . . . maybe they are just jerks. Maybe they hate handicapped people. But I don't have to grovel, because the free market offers me someone down the street who wants my business enough to make those changes.

If a company wants to hire me because they figure that I can do the job — even if I cost them extra because of my handicaps — then great, I'd want to work for them. But if they don't want to hire me, fine. If they just don't like me, fine. I don't want to work for them.

I don't want to be hired out of pity, or because a business that might already be strapped for cash has to meet its government cripple quota. I want to work for them as long as they want me to work for them.

Thanks to the ADA, round doorknobs are already illegal in corporate America. But what happens when the ADA is retroactively extended to housing developments? Some residential building codes already require ADA compliance. I personally prefer levered doorknobs to round ones, because I don't have to use both hands to turn them. But I'm not changing the few round doorknobs left in my house even if the government tells me to. My house will be the last house in America to change its few round doorknobs if required to do so by the government. I look forward to the day when they come and put me in handcuffs for that — I guess they'll have to use some special ADA-approved cuffs because I can easily slip out of regular ones.

What do I want the government doing to help me function better in society? What do I want the government doing to help me be more equal in society? What do I want the government doing to help me have more opportunity than I would otherwise?

Only one thing.

There is one definite thing I want the government to do to help me function better among people who don't have such handicaps — I want the government to get out of my way and leave me alone!

What do I want Wal-Mart to do so that I have a better shopping experience in their stores? What do I want Wal-Mart to do to make me more equal as a customer who sometimes uses crutches or a wheelchair? What do I want Wal-Mart to do to help me shop where normal people shop?

I want Wal-Mart to do whatever they think they need to do to keep me as a customer. If they don't want my business, someone else will. Of course Wal-Mart does want my business, and so do most others. The government doesn't have to force them to be compassionate. When it comes to businesses, my wallet will bring all the compassion I need.

I see it as my duty to teach those who are normal how the ADA has harmed them in ways they've never imagined. I want to expose how it's not only the ADA lawyers but also the other professions that are increasing discrimination against the handicapped, and destroying the fabric of America. If I wanted to harm the handicapped, the first thing I'd do is campaign to strengthen the ADA.

There is little hope that a law such as the ADA will be eliminated. It's far easier to drop oil into a bucket of water than it is to do away with the drop of oil once it's in the bucket. But it's time for us to stop rolling over and letting these things happen to us! These kinds of laws must be kept from getting any stronger. We must question every one of them.

And remember: when a law is "compassionate," that means it will cost you money and harm the very people it's supposed to be helping.

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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