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15 C H A P T E R 1 l Autonomy,Solidarity, andLaw’sPedagogy Awoman with an obvious disability making her way along Chicago’s Michigan Avenue in December 1970 would not have been simply enjoying the spectacle of one of the nation’s busiest commercial venues at the height of the Christmas shopping season. Whether she knew it or not, she also would have been engaged in an illegal act, for on the books of the Chicago Municipal Code at that time was an ordinance colloquially known as “the ugly law,” which provided that “no person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object or improper person to be allowed in or on the public ways or other public places in this city, or shall therein or thereon expose himself to public view, under a penalty of not less than one dollar nor more than fifty dollars for each offense.”1 Cities such as Columbus, Ohio, and Omaha, Nebraska, had similar laws—and they were not repealed until the mid-1970s.2 Most of us today recoil at the ugly law’s view of persons with disabilities; to contemporary ears, the law’s title is an accurate, if ironic, reflection of the moral quality of the law’s expressed sentiments. But what, precisely, is objectionable about it? In my view, the salient objections can be grouped into three categories. First, the ugly law places significant practical barriers in the way of persons with disabilities. It prevents them from going about their business; it dissuades them from living their day-to-day lives. If they nonetheless decide to attempt to do so, they risk being arrested, penalized, and publicly shamed for engaging in activities that most of us take for granted, such as going shopping, visiting friends, and attending worship services. 16 Law as a Moral Teacher A second problem has to do with the normative presuppositions behind the ugly law—the concrete prohibitions and penalties are infused with a morally freighted vision of how human beings should live their lives together. The ugly law adopts a particular view of the value of an individual, conveying the message that it is important to be “normal”—to be aesthetically pleasing (or at least not disgusting) to others. In addition, it communicates a clear vision of the respective obligations of different groups of persons within the broader society. Those with disabilities have an obligation to stay out of the way—and out of the line of sight—of those who are “normal.” By contrast, “normal” persons have very few, if any, obligations to extend themselves in any way toward the mentally and physically challenged individuals who come across their paths. In the vision of reality inculcated by the ugly law, chance and accident can create a moral and social chasm between people. The random circumstances of one’s conception or birth (e.g., I was born with Down syndrome, you were not) or of one’s life (e.g., the drunken driver hit her but missed him) can determine whether one is deemed worthy to participate in the public life of the community. Third, the broad ramifications of the message conveyed by the ugly law are also very troubling. Assume that the citizens of Chicago internalize the normative vision of the worth of persons with disabilities that is tacitly presupposed by the law. Does it not seem likely that those citizens will also apply the law’s norms even in contexts where the law does not explicitly govern? For example, how will so-called normal people relate to persons with disabilities in private settings? And how will persons with disabilities view themselves? If they do not have the right to walk the city streets in peace, will they ever be able to see themselves as anything but second-class citizens in other areas of their lives? Will they not be forced to confront internal and external pressures, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, to make themselves invisible and to refrain from making any claims on the attention or concern of “normal” members of the community? Thus the problem extends far beyond the fact that the ugly law tightly restricts the ability of persons with disabilities to go about their day-to-day lives; the deeper difficulty is the intrinsic messages that the law conveys about the relative worth of persons with disabilities. The effects of these messages are not limited to the streets...

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