Tag Archives: Assholes

Alabama WTF?

First Alabama passed a law requiring a driver’s license or similar state-issued ID to vote. Then they closed all but four DMVs in the state, and all of the DMVs in majority African-American counties. Sounds bad. It’s worse than that.

The whole process disproportionately disenfranchises African-Americans, rural voters of all races (who are generally more distant from DMVs), poor people of all races (who may not have the means to take time off work and travel across the state), and people with disabilities (who also may not have the ability to travel long distances, in public or borrowed transportation, to get a license). It’s racist and it ultimately limits the franchise to middle-class urban and suburban non-disabled folks of any race.

But wait! There’s more!

[T]he agency says by next March there may only be four driver’s license offices open in the state.

“Well unfortunately what citizens you know could expect is longer lines, or often times scheduling way in advance to get an opportunity, and probably the worst is some have to travel a significant distance to be able to get that driver’s license serviced,” Spencer Collier, Alabama Law Enforcement Agency Secretary said.

The focus has naturally been on the effect this has on voting, without stopping to think about the effect this has on DRIVING. That’s right, that privilege the state grants you to get behind the wheel of a vehicle and do things like drive to your job, drive the equipment you might need to be able to drive to DO your job, drive to hospitals and doctors’ offices, drive to the grocery store, and of course drive down the highway with the radio up and the windows down trying to forget that YOU LIVE IN THE MOST BACKWARD STATE IN THE NATION.

The economic impact of the inability to drive is huge, and will now fall disproportionately on African-Americans, and people of any race who are disabled and/or poor and/or live in rural areas.

Not just Mississippi Goddam, but Alabama WTF?

Source: Alabama DMV closings draw call for federal voting rights probe | MSNBC

Title III doesn’t [just] need damages; it needs a public shaming remedy. Update: I appear to have been punk’d.

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Update: While it’s true that Title III most definitely needs a public shaming remedy, this case may not be the vehicle for it. Gawker reports that the whole thing was a hoax. Not wishing to be equally credulous of the debunking as I was of the original bunking, I’ll leave the various links and let you decide.

Original post:

Family says girl scarred by pit bull attack asked to leave KFC restaurant.

A 3-year-old girl who was attacked by pit bulls in April was asked to leave a restaurant in Mississippi because her scars scared customers, the girl’s grandmother told a television station there.

…

“They said, ‘We have to ask you to leave because her face is disrupting our customers.’ [The girl] understood exactly what they said.”

As you can imagine, this is pretty much an automatic violation of Title III of the ADA, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in public accommodations, including restaurants. But Title III has no damages remedy; the only thing the girl and her family would be entitled to would be an order permitting them to eat at the restaurant in question.

Second prize: two meals!

Since there’s no damages remedy and the injunctive remedy is somewhere between less-than-useless and adding-insult-to-injury, I propose — in addition to the very-expensive-scotch remedy for hotel reservation violations — that Title III have a public shaming remedy.

Here, the remedy would include a requirement that (1) the waitstaffperson who made the request wear a sign saying “I acted like an asshole. I’ve learned my lesson. I will not act like an asshole — at least to people with disabilities in restaurants — in the future;” (2) the owner of the restaurant wear a sign saying, “I promise not to hire assholes and I promise to train my staff not to act like assholes,” and (3) the waitstaffperson and restaurant owner buy the entire family a meal at the best restaurant in town as well as a year’s supply of Popeye’s fried chicken, which everyone knows is the far superior take-out fried chicken.