In the name of ‘fairness,’ everyone forced to pay for expensive chair lifts

By David McElroy · March 15, 2012

You might have noticed hotels and other public places with swimming pools making sudden changes to their facilities lately. They’re adding chair lift devices to pools and hot tubs. These devices can lift someone in a wheelchair from the ground and lower the person into the water.

Have the hotels suddenly discovered that there’s a hot untapped market in catering to people in wheelchairs who are hankering to use swimming pools? Not at all. They’re simply being forced to spend a lot of money to comply with new federal regulations handed down by the Obama administration in the name of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And the new rules might close some pools.

The new rules go into effect today. They cover lots more things than just chair lifts, but that’s one of the more prominent ones. The new lifts cost between $5,000 and $10,000 each. If a hotel has a pool and a hot tub — even side by side — it’s not enough to have one unit that can be moved between the two places. No, the regulations require one for the pool and one for the hot tub, even if nobody uses either one of them. And if a hotel fails to comply, the penalty can be as much as $55,000.

Many people are hesitant to criticize rules that are designed to “accommodate” people with disabilities, but there’s a very real and very fair question to ask. Is it right to force everyone to pay for very expensive modifications to hotels and other public facilities just to suit the possible needs of a tiny fraction of people? What gives those people a constitutional or moral right to demand that we pay for what they want or decide they need?

And it’s not just chair lifts. Rules handed down related to ADA compliance in the past have suddenly changed. For instance, it used to be that a light switch had to be located 52 inches above the floor. Why 52 inches? Who knows? Some bureaucrat decided that at some point, so it became law. Now a different bureaucrat had decided the proper height for the switch is 48 inches, so a switch installed at the old federally demanded height is now the new illegal height. Why do bureaucrats have the right to decide these things?

(Our overlords have graciously granted special dispensation on this point. Switches already built at 52 inches can remain there, but new ones must be at 48 inches. Does this mean people using the older rooms are being “discriminated” against?)

Other random changes for hotels are more difficult to comply with. If a hotel had formerly put all of its ADA-compliant rooms into one area, that’s no longer allowed:

One of the biggest changes is the location of accessible rooms within a hotel. They must be dispersed evenly throughout the hotel based on room type and other amenities. If a property offers rooms with king, queen and double beds, accessible rooms must offer the same. And hotels must make available preferred view rooms, such as those showing the ocean.

Why does the federal government — in the person of nameless bureaucrats — get to decide how a hotel runs its business and who it wants to cater to? It’s simply because somebody has decided it’s not “fair” that the world is a very different experience for some people. They’ve decided that what’s “fair” is for us to pay for their desires to modify the world — and they don’t really care to let the market work instead.

If you can justify these sort of coercive and arbitrary rules, are there any rules you can’t justify? If these are moral and legal, isn’t it just as moral and legal to dictate color schemes or types of background music or the comfort of restaurant seating? If you can justify the things demanded by the ADA, you can justify anything that any bureaucrat can dream up.

Life isn’t fair. It makes some of us less bright, some of us less attractive and some of us disabled. Choosing to steal from the rest of us doesn’t make life any more fair to the disabled. It just makes all of us victims of theft — and it turns them into a class of people who feel entitled to being treated as they demand.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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