Does it ever just blow your mind that buildings have more rights than living, breathing, people in wheelchairs? Like there are...
Does it ever just blow your mind that buildings have more rights than living, breathing, people in wheelchairs?
Like there are literally clauses which protect historical buildings and other types of buildings from having to be ADA compliant because it will destroy the aesthetic of said buildings. The aesthetic. People refuse to make things accessible because it will destroy aesthetics. Theaters, front entrances to old buildings, old staircases, etc. all have more rights than the average cripple.
I like a good sweeping staircase as much as the next admirer of architecture but there’s something genuinely awful about the fact that said staircase has more rights than I do. It’s not something that ever really sinks in until 2:00 AM on a random Saturday morning…
Quick, somebody make the utilitarian case that the aesthetic enjoyment of thousands is greater when aggregated than the inconvenience of a tiny minority.
You’re not allowed to demolish living breathing people in wheelchairs either. You don’t even get to argue that they’re not historically important wheelchair people, it’s just a blind blanket ban. Next time someone tries to carve you up to install a wheelchair lift I hope you feel a little more empathy for those buildings.
The law, in its majestic equality, grants disabled people and historic buildings alike the freedom not to have accessibility ramps installed in them.
Oh this is a great example of the limits of the “civil rights” idiom in the American system
Cause when George (“the Elder”, “Thousand Points of Light”) Bush signed the ADA in 1990, he was representing a pre-Reaganite progressive Republican tradition proud to carry through on expanding the constellation of civil rights law
But for a decade already civil rights law had been culturally delegitimated as gimmedats and extortion setups (thru third-party lawsuit enforcement/“community benefit” reqs. for bank licensing etc.) and the Reagan administration (and city/state Dem administrations that were still lunchbox white working class machines) had appointed administrators and judges to back that
And so there was some high-profile pushback, I remember some NYC nuns refused permission to upgrade their walkup tenement hospice unless they gutted it for an elevator, but more than that it was lower-level judge-made and administrative law
Like a few guys made a thing of wheeling up looking for suits, their sob stories all ready for juries, and people who were already a decade and a half tired of this shit heard “this building built before 1991 for bipeds with clutching hands is a trespass against humanity” and went “NOPE NOPE NOPE THAT’S NOT WHAT WE’RE FOR, NOPE NOPE NOPE FUCK RIGHT OUT THAT DOOR”