I ended up seeing that too. My mom had an electric chair that was about 150 pounds. So that changes things.
But this venue could not scare up a regular wheel chair?
ADA has been law for 30 years. How did that building ever get approved without wheelchair access to the stage? (I will cut them some slack if they have a lift, but it just wasn’t up to the task of a 400 lb. chair.)
In any case, every candidate there that didn’t immediately move down to the floor when it became apparent there was a problem would be dead to me, never to get my vote for anything other than “asshole.”
Or they should have decided to move the debate to the floor before he climbed onto the stage.
Certainly there where better options. A number of them.
Hell, just move him up to the stage and in a regular chair for the duration if that’s reasonable. Though yes, if no one else kicked up a fuss I’d be angry too.
I was thinking that the building is accessible to handicapped people, but nobody ever gave a thought about the stage. Perhaps they’d never seen a play or a concert or whatever with an actual handicapped person on-stage. They just didn’t think of it. As far as they were concerned, they were ADA compliant because the entry and auditorium were ADA compliant.
I’m a positive person. Don’t ascribe to mallace what could easily come from stupidity.
That being said, unless the candidate joined the day before, there’s no way they didn’t know he had a wheelchair and would need to get it up on stage. Hell, building a ramp would take an hour.
Nope. It was intentional.
You said it better than I did.
At the very least, the debate organizers had to have been bigoted, in the all-too-common “don’t blame me, blame the system” way. The response was “I’m sorry, but The Rules say that you have to take part in the debate, and it’s on stage. No, I don’t know how you can do that, but don’t blame me, I didn’t make The Rules.”. But any non-bigoted person would have responded with something more like “Hm, yes, that is a problem, let’s see what we can figure out to solve it”.
I’m really not a very litigious type, but that sounds like a lawsuit to me.
No shit. If I was that candidate I would have let them pull the funding, then sued the Bejesus out of everybody involved, including the site, the organizers and the source of the funds. That’s such a slam dunk the lawyers would be swarming for a piece of that settlement. Plus punitive damages.
He presumably wants to get elected. Costing the town a shitload of money, especially in small towns when said shitload may have a directly visible effect on taxes, is not a good way to do that.
If it were me, I’d go with ‘I could sue the town for a shitload of money. But, out of the goodness of my heart and out of concern for the town’s budget, I’ll refrain from doing so if the town gets this fixed immediately. The period of time I would have to file a lawsuit is [I don’t know what it is exactly, but it’s probably in months, not years.] Get it done before the next debate if at all possible, but if and only if you can show me good reason why it’ll take longer, then at least before the lawsuit filing deadline.’
And make that a public statement; probably using some term other than shitload, and of course looking up the filing date first.
It’s Denver. They have the dough.
Exactly, if this was Sleepy Creek, Nebraska where the local economy was based around quilting that’s one thing.
Ah. I managed to miss that.
How the hell did Denver wind up holding a required candidates’ meeting on an inaccessible stage?
Have you been to Colorado? They have a fair complement of decent folk but by far no shortage of assholes, idiots and idiot assholes.
You know, the common clay of the New West.
Not recently. As in, I think the last time was in the early 1980’s. I do have good friends there; but I don’t think they consider themselves representative of the state.
But I wasn’t in any case thinking of Colorado as a whole. I was thinking, sizeable city.
Remember Brock Turner, the Stanford student who got a six month slap on the wrist for raping a woman? Well, the voters recalled the judge who gave him the weak sentence, and the judge, Aaron Persky, just surfaced working as a high school girls’ tennis coach. That is, till the parents and the school found out who he was, and fired him.
https://12ft.io/proxy?&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thedailybeast.com%2Faaron-persky-judge-who-oversaw-brock-turner-rape-case-now-a-tennis-coach-at-bay-area-high-school
Good move. He’s already made it clear that he’s not interested in protecting young women. Plus, they can probably do without the notoriety of having someone like that on their staff.