Next time you’re at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, check out the new 110-square-foot wheelchair accessible bathroom in Terminal 2. It has a roll-in and transfer shower, an accessible toilet and sink, and even a lift for hoisting someone up out of a wheelchair. It also has an adjustable, adult-size changing table.
Everybody’s seen those baby changing stations in public bathrooms. But some disabled people who are no longer baby-size need those, too.
But as always, the bathroom culture wars are not going away. As some people continually seek to redefine what an inclusive public bathroom looks like, conservative forces staunchly defend the bathroom status quo.
In January, two Arizona moms of disabled teenagers got together to form a group called Dignified Changes. The group’s website says the moms “were tired of changing their full-grown special-needs daughters on the dirty bathroom floor, or on a park bench, while siblings held towels up for privacy, or in a hot van, in the middle of a parking lot, during an Arizona summer.”
The Americans With Disabilities Act doesn’t require the installation of such tables in public bathrooms. So these moms and others managed to persuade Arizona State Representative Richard Andrade, a Democrat, to introduce a bill in the state legislature requiring the installation of these tables in public bathrooms that are newly constructed or undergo a renovation of $10,000 or more.
“To me it was a no-brainer,” Andrade told me in an interview. The legislation moved forward at a swift pace. It passed through the House Health and Human Services Committee. But then it stalled in the Rules Committee, which is chaired by State Representative Anthony Kern, a Republican. Kern said in a statement that he objected to the bill because he “[doesn’t] believe that government mandates are good policy.”
And so the bill died. It was the kind of nasty obstructionism that would make Mitch McConnell proud.
Andrade says, “It didn’t surprise me but it angered me.” He felt that Kern was putting his “personal beliefs” above the greater good.
So Andrade joined with a House Republican to pull a slick political end-run around Kern. They used a procedure called strike all, in which the language of a bill that has already passed is completely stricken and new language is added. A watered-down version of Andrade’s legislation became the new text of that bill.
The bill went back through the House and passed 56-2. In May 7, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey signed it into law. It says any “public entity” that constructs or “totally renovates” a public restroom that is open to men and women in a public building shall include at least one restroom per building with a changing table “that is capable of serving both a baby and an adult.” A public entity is defined as a state or local government body or agency and a total renovation is one of $50,000 or more.
Kern was one of the no votes. He told the Capital News Service in Arizona, “Today you’re going to mandate it in state facilities, tomorrow you’re going to mandate it in private facilities.”
But Kern should take heart. The scope of the mandate is so limited that there will still be plenty of times when these moms will still have no option but to lie their kids on bathroom floors. Those that fight so hard to preserve hostile, unwelcoming public bathrooms can at least be thankful for that.