Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!yale!bunker!hcap!hnews!115!778.1!Eric.Bohlman
From: Eric.Bohlman@p1.f778.n115.z1.fidonet.org (Eric Bohlman)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: Re: Chances Are!
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Date: 28 Jun 90 16:59:16 GMT
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Index Number: 8975

[This is from the Blink Talk Conference]

Maybe we could put this airline seat problem (I nearly wrote "airline seat  
thing."  Bushspeak will creep up on you if you aren't careful!) into  
perspective by considering another safety-related situation.  Remember that  
I'm sighted, so I may be approaching this from a somewhat different angle.

Consider a landlord who doesn't want to rent an apartment to a blind person  
for fear that he'll start a fire while cooking.  That's definitely a safety  
consideration.  However, if that landlord is willing to rent to smokers  
(careless smoking causes FAR more residential fires then cooking accidents),  
he's singling out blind people for discriminatory treatment, and I'd go as far  
as saying that he's discriminating on the basis of lack of clout (smokers have  
"freedom to do what they want" while blind people "are lucky to get what they  
can."  The key here isn't really that the blind person is being "discriminated  
against" but that the discrimination is based on a double standard.

Around the turn of the century there was a Supreme Court case known as Yick Wo  
which dealt with the issue of safety regulations being applied in a  
discriminatory manner.  The city of San Francisco had an ordinance requiring  
special regulatory approval for laundries when the building was made of wood  
rather than brick.  This was based on fire-safety considerations.  However, it  
turned out that the main criterion the city used in deciding whether to grant  
such approval was the nationality of the laundry's owner; if the owner was  
Chinese, the approval was almost never granted, and if the owner was a  
native-born American, it almost always was granted.  The court ruled that the  
mere fact that the mere fact that safety was the end purpose of the ordinance  
did not entitle the city to discriminate based on nationality.
 

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