Baby Goebbels' latest...

[mopinko]

10. bring back the ugly laws?

u 1st asshole.

In 1881, apparently with little debate or controversy, Chicago’s City Council passed a law barring all “diseased, maimed, mutilated” people from the city’s public streets. This was just one of a number of “ugly laws” passed in different parts of the country in the second half of the nineteenth century, as Adrienne Phelps Coco explains. Such legal discrimination against disabled people may be shocking to us today, but the context in which the law was passed and enforced also reflects patterns that still resonate.

Coco notes that the law’s passage followed years of dehumanizing reporting on disabled panhandlers. One 1875 Chicago Tribune article decried the “disgraceful” spectacle of “a thoroughfare being obstructed by the hideous monstrosities, which are only half human, begging for alms.” Another story warned that seeing a person with “repulsive deformity” might present a serious danger to “a lady in delicate health.” And still others targeted specific beggars, accusing them of exaggerating their disabilities or even inflicting injuries on themselves in an effort to win sympathy

https://daily.jstor.org/the-ugly-history-of-chicagos-ugly-law/

only repealed in chgo in 1973.