If you’re like me and you travel with a guide dog you learn a lot about discrimination. Over the last twenty years I’ve been barred from entering restaurants and book stores, riding in taxis and even boarding a jet liner because untrained service personnel either didn’t know what a guide dog was, or they just didn’t care. The indignities I’ve experienced are common among people with disabilities who rely on professionally trained dogs to help them walk, cross streets, open doors, resist falling, or prevent seizures.
The article by Tara Palmeri in today’s New York Post entitled “Liars Use Phony Vests and ID Tags to Get Fake Service Dogs Into Posh New York Restaurants” is one of the most willfully underhanded pieces about disability I’ve ever seen in a newspaper–and I should add I’m a veteran of the sixties. I’ve seen and heard some big league untruths in my time. Palmeri (who is convinced fake service animals and phony disabilities are a scourge) has found her metier–inflaming the public by insisting there are ersatz cripples everywhere.
Ms. Palmeri isn’t sophisticated but she’s onto something: stories about sham cripples have always sparked the public nerve. The first commercial movies in the United States were often about men who pretended to be blind or paralyzed until the cops arrived. Then they were suddenly cured and in grand comic fashion they ran like hell. What’s especially interesting about those films is they were written and produced in an age marked by “the ugly laws” which forbade real disabled people from appearing on the streets. Palmeri writes about a complex issue pretending to knowledge but like those early films, the presentation is a trick. Real people with disabilities are being treated to a serious disservice by the Post.
I have no doubt there are people smuggling their golden retrievers onto airplanes by claiming old “Tucker” or “Sparky” is a service dog. But I’ll wager my future false teeth there are fewer people doing this than, say, swiping handicapped parking spaces–and the latter not just occasionally, but every minute every day.
Of course you can’t legislate morality. But the “L” word is in fact the real issue for the New York Post which has always hated the Americans with Disabilities Act. Restaurants and businesses all across the country hate the ADA–but especially in Manhattan where there’s been more hand wringing and whinging about installing accessible toilets and ramps than in most other cities. Opposition to the ADA in New York has blossomed greatly under the successive administrations of Giuliani and Bloomberg.
What really bothers the post is the very existence of the ADA. One way to inveigle the public (which generally likes the law) is to trot out the old movie trick. “Did you know, Mavis, there are fake cripples bringing their filthy pet poodles into Le Cirque?” Under the ADA people with disabilities are not required to produce papers or certificates proving they have a disability or proving their service dog is real. Why? (Ms. Palmeri presents this freedom from paper as an even greater scandal than the salmon swallowing poodle she’s managed to smuggle into a restaurant.) The answer of course is that the ADA is a civil rights law. It guarantees people with disabilities the right to go anywhere the general public goes. If I leave my house to visit the drug store I don’t have to produce a document saying what my disability is, or what my dog has been trained to do. This is called decency in some quarters.
Palmeri plays at street theater. She brings untrained dogs into eateries, lets them behave badly and posits the idea that this is terribly unfair to everyone. And its all because of that damned disability act.
What the Post doesn’t tell you is this: service dogs are not guaranteed access to public spaces or restaurants. If they behave badly you can ask the owner to leave.
A service dog is not a pet. Its training encompasses both the realities of disability assistance and public manners. Guide dogs are allowed everywhere by law and part of the reason is they’re impeccable guests in all public spaces.
You would never guess any of this from reading Ms. Palmeri’s prose. Dishonest? You bet.
Related post: http://badcripple.blogspot.com/2013/08/tara-palmeri-on-service-dogs-misleading.html
Planet of the Blind 