Six years ago, I snarkily conjectured that the egailtarians would go after libraries on the grounds that most of their content was inaccessible to the deaf and blind. That was meant to be a reductio ad absurdum.
But now the Department of Justice has gone after UC Berkeley’s online library for precisely that reason.
The leveling instinct when empowered by the Americans with Disabilities Act leads to strange places.
So now I need an even more absurd snarky conjecture for six years out.
Here are two: (1) The Justice Department will close Yosemite to climbers because there’s no elevator for the limbless, (2) and it will shut down the nation’s strip clubs that don’t have proper ramps for wheelchair-bound exotic dancers to get on stage.
My father pointed out something rather disturbing about the Americans with Disabilities Act: We are legally required to provide ingress for disabled people, but NOT egress in emergencies. An elevator that shuts down during a fire is considered perfectly acceptable in terms of allowing access to the disabled–and anyone who can’t use stairs is doomed if such buildings ever catch fire.
As for strip clubs, I don’t think that’ll work. There are clubs for those who prefer to see dancers with….alternative morphological configurations, shall we say? Human sexuality is weird, even beyond the bounds of regulatory weirdness.
All I can say is: the power of ideas. This is the logical conclusion.