The squatter currently occupying the White House isn’t the only one on the warpath these days. Attorneys general from seventeen states are pursuing a federal lawsuit that seeks to invalidate Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 by having it declared unconstitutional.
The lawsuit is named Texas v. Becerra, from Texas being the first plaintiff.
This is a big deal for disabled folks because Section 504 was our first comprehensive civil rights law. It prohibits “any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance” from discriminating against any “qualified individual with a disability in the United States.”
I think this is the main reason the United States is much more accessible to people with disabilities than it was prior to 1973. Important places like hospitals, schools, and public transit entities receive some sort of federal financial assistance. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 extended the obligation to make things accessible to pretty much all public and private entities, whether or not they received federal financial assistance.
So why, more than fifty years after the Rehabilitation Act became law, are these attorneys general suddenly so eager to trash Section 504? Well, it seems like they just cannot resist using this as an excuse to take more cheap shots at transgender people.
In May 2024, the lawsuit begins by pointing out, President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services released a final rule of revised Section 504 regulations, which says that gender dysphoria “may be a disability.” The Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) points out on its website that this conclusion was based on an appellate court case in which an incarcerated person was initially kept with the women until a medical exam revealed their male genitalia. The court agreed that gender dysphoria can qualify as a disability as defined by Section 504 and the ADA under certain circumstances.
The DREDF website says: “We agree with this common-sense approach . . . . It is important for the disability community to stand in solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community and to oppose attacks targeting transgender people.”
These attorneys general are also grousing about the “integration mandate” in the final rule. It says that services provided by entities covered by Section 504 must be offered to disabled people in “the most integrated setting appropriate to the needs of the qualified individual with a disability.”
By taking loud exception to this concept, the attorneys general demonstrate how they don’t know and/or don’t care that generations of disabled folks have been locked away in cruel isolation.
There once was a time when disabled folks were routinely and involuntarily uprooted to some distant asylum, nursing home, or school just so they could receive public services. The whole point of laws like Section 504 is to challenge this type of lazy and destructive thinking, but more than fifty years later, many disabled Americans are still being mistreated under this selfish public policy.
It seems as though these attorneys general prefer that disabled people just went away and died so they don’t have to be bothered with us. They probably would ask the court to make us go away and die, if they could.