"Ugly laws" gone but the sentiment remains

Did you know that if I had been born a couple decades earlier, I could be arrested for appearing in public?

I didn't know either, until I saw the movie Music Within. It's about Richard Pimental, a man who becomes mostly deaf due to a Vietnam War injury and then spends the next several years devoting himself to helping people with disabilities get employment. I recommend it.

The one scene that really stuck with me was when Richard and his friend, who is wheelchair-bound and twitches due to severe cerebral palsy, are kicked out of a restaurant. The waitress rudely informs Richard that his friend is unsightly and is making the other patrons uncomfortable. More shockingly, when they refused to leave, they were arrested. Arrested under what was called an "Ugly" law.

Until the 1960s and 70s, apparently a number of large American cities had laws that made it illegal for someone with an "unsightly or disgusting" disability to appear in public. I was not aware of this despite some well-regarded literature on the matter.

I started thinking about how such laws could have affected me, with my scarred arms and stumpy hands. Could someone at a restaurant have called the police and had me hauled out? It seems almost unthinkable, but "unsightly or disgusting" is not very well-defined in these laws. They're subjective. What one person finds unsightly, another would not. This gives enormous power to law enforcement and allows for an enormous amount of bias.

Surely such laws were rarely enforced. But they were insidious nonetheless, in that they prey on fears that people with disabilities already have (or at least that I had when I first became disabled). Fears that we won't be accepted or able to participate fully in society.

Times seem to have change since the "ugly laws" were repealed. People with disabilities are less institutionalized and more visible in the community. The ADA and Medicaid waiver services that followed the Supreme Court's Olmstead decision helped. But changing laws, of course, doesn't change hearts.

This CNN story about Gophers football coach Jerry Kill proves we still have a ways to go. Kill has epilepsy, and after he had a seizure on television he received emails calling him a "freak" and a columnist at a major newspaper said he should be replaced because he was making the football team an object of pity. Kill has proven himself to be good at his job and epilepsy is a well-known part of the human condition. Why the hate? Why the derision?

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think it has something to with a misguided sense of what is "normal," and a discomfort with anything that does not fit that template. This is, of course, warped. Humanity quite normally includes all sorts of variety in the way people look, move, speak, etc. But people are uncomfortable with that which they're unaccustomed to.

It is only in the last few years that I have gotten comfortable going out in public with short sleeves and have stopped trying to hide my hands in pockets. It took time to get to the point where my honest emotion was "If anyone has an issue with it, it's their problem."

But it's also a societal problem. And we all have a role to play in solving it. Reevaluate what you think is "normal" in the context of what you know is human.