INCLUSION DAILY EXPRESS -- ADA 20th Birthday

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Happy 20th Birthday ADA!!!
Commentary by Dave Reynolds, Inclusion Daily Express
July 26, 2010

On July 26, 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed into effect Public Law 101-306, commonly known as the Americans with Disabilities Act.

I was working at a Salem, Oregon Goodwill Industries at the time and knew little about the law or the event. The next day, a coworker of mine named Mike (who knew much more about these matters than I did) told me this was the most sweeping law for people with disabilities. Mike also predicted that the people who would benefit the most from the ADA over the coming years would be attorneys.

"The ADA is so vague, they are going to spend the next twenty years in the courts just trying to figure out what it means," Mike explained.

Well, here we are twenty years later, and, what do you know . . . he was partly right.

When the ADA became law, some in the disability community said it was, in essence, a rough draft. Much of what has been happening since 1990 has been clarifying what the law is and what it is not; who it covers and who it does not; who can be punished for not following the law and who cannot; and what that punishment will and will not look like.

The courts are trimming down the rough draft to get to that final draft. Unfortunately, what gets trimmed away has depended to a great deal on who is in the courts at the time and how they interpret the law. And that may not necessarily be what the designers of the ADA had in mind. Many advocates believe key decisions by the Supreme Court have weakened the ADA.

Has the ADA done what it was intended to do?

Not exactly. The ADA has been called a "civil rights" law. But what civil rights law would allow a whole group of citizens to be discriminated against as blatantly as they are twenty years after the law was signed?

Spend any length of time in any neighborhood across the USA and no doubt you will find schools, businesses, civic buildings, work places, houses of worship and meeting areas that do not welcome people with certain disabilities. I often have to ask myself, "Would such discrimination have been tolerated if the group of citizens were African Americans, Jewish Americans, or European Americans?" and "What kind of law puts the responsibility to enforce the law on the backs of those who have to face the discrimination?"

There are people with a great deal of influence that believe that the ADA is too powerful as it is, that it gets in the way of private enterprise, and that it costs taxpayers too much in terms of having to make accommodations for a small population. I am reminded of a conversation I had with a civic leader who argued that small businesses in his town were being forced to close up because it was costing too much to comply with the ADA. This made no sense to me. First of all, the ADA gives small businesses the option of making accommodations only if they are "reasonable" and do not cause a financial hardship to the business. Secondly, not one business in this particular town had ever complied with the ADA -- so, how could any of them have been forced to close up by complying with the ADA?

In some ways the ADA has done what it was intended, and more. Captioning of television and movies -- even advertisements -- are more common than not. Most elevators and bank machines have instructions in Braille. Most new buildings are built with at least one accessible bathroom in mind.

Then there is the 1999 Olmstead ruling, that could not have happened without the ADA. Using the reasoning that publicly-funded services must be accessed in the "least restrictive setting", the Supreme Court found that keeping people in institutions "unnecessarily", based on their disability alone, was a form of discrimination. This has led to a shift in how people are beginning to think about state and federally-funded services for people with disabilities. We may eventually get to a point where it will no longer be assumed right away that a person must go to a nursing home or other institution because of a disability or a label.

Still, there is much more work to do. Eleven years after Olmstead, activists and lawyers are still having to push individual states to implement the ruling. There is still a very high unemployment rate for workers with disabilities. Far too many buildings -- including school buildings -- are not accessible or do not have ways for people with disabilities to escape safely in the event of a fire or other disaster.

So, we look back at the past 20 years knowing that the ADA, while not perfect, was a start. And we look toward the future knowing that we all can have a part in putting the finishing touches on that final draft, and help make the law do what the first drafters dreamed.

Happy 20th birthday ADA!!!

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