NY Times: Hey, Let’s Make Ugly People A Protected Class, Offer Them Same Legal Protections As Handicapped…
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Fugly) seen nodding in approval.
(NY Times) — BEING good-looking is useful in so many ways.
In addition to whatever personal pleasure it gives you, being attractive also helps you earn more money, find a higher-earning spouse (and one who looks better, too!) and get better deals on mortgages. Each of these facts has been demonstrated over the past 20 years by many economists and other researchers. The effects are not small: one study showed that an American worker who was among the bottom one-seventh in looks, as assessed by randomly chosen observers, earned 10 to 15 percent less per year than a similar worker whose looks were assessed in the top one-third — a lifetime difference, in a typical case, of about $230,000.
Beauty is as much an issue for men as for women. While extensive research shows that women’s looks have bigger impacts in the market for mates, another large group of studies demonstrates that men’s looks have bigger impacts on the job.
Why this disparate treatment of looks in so many areas of life? It’s a matter of simple prejudice. Most of us, regardless of our professed attitudes, prefer as customers to buy from better-looking salespeople, as jurors to listen to better-looking attorneys, as voters to be led by better-looking politicians, as students to learn from better-looking professors. This is not a matter of evil employers’ refusing to hire the ugly: in our roles as workers, customers and potential lovers we are all responsible for these effects.
How could we remedy this injustice? With all the gains to being good-looking, you would think that more people would get plastic surgery or makeovers to improve their looks. Many of us do all those things, but as studies have shown, such refinements make only small differences in our beauty. All that spending may make us feel better, but it doesn’t help us much in getting a better job or a more desirable mate.
A more radical solution may be needed: why not offer legal protections to the ugly, as we do with racial, ethnic and religious minorities, women and handicapped individuals?
We actually already do offer such protections in a few places, including in some jurisdictions in California, and in the District of Columbia, where discriminatory treatment based on looks in hiring, promotions, housing and other areas is prohibited. Ugliness could be protected generally in the United States by small extensions of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Ugly people could be allowed to seek help from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and other agencies in overcoming the effects of discrimination. We could even have affirmative-action programs for the ugly.
The mechanics of legislating this kind of protection are not as difficult as you might think. You might argue that people can’t be classified by their looks — that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That aphorism is correct in one sense: if asked who is the most beautiful person in a group of beautiful people, you and I might well have different answers. But when it comes to differentiating classes of attractiveness, we all view beauty similarly: someone whom you consider good-looking will be viewed similarly by most others; someone you consider ugly will be viewed as ugly by most others. In one study, more than half of a group of people were assessed identically by each of two observers using a five-point scale; and very few assessments differed by more than one point.
Posted by ZIP on Monday, August 29, 2011, at 9:32 am | 
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John Lewis and Maxine Waters are on board!
Well, how the hell did the wookie get where she’s at?
I wonder how many truffles Waxman has found.
Just what the US needs—more “protected classes” to engage in grievance-mongering litigation.
There were lefties who tried accusing people of “look-ism” when I was on campus 40 years ago. Even then we saw this as a pathetic attempt to guilt-trip the people they were attracted to into bed; it was, of course, all right for them to be “lookist” and go after whomever they found attractive, but if the object of their affections did not reciprocate, it was, of course, their fault.
Who’s going to determine who’s ugly and who isn’t?
It’s a subjective judgment.
Boomerette….I’m sure all whites are considered beautiful for this new ideology!!
And while we are at it,let’s give legal protection to fat people,people who wear glasses,people who are left-handed,short people,people who are too tall,people who are stupid,liberals(but I repeat myself on that one)Feel free to add your own!
I have a little weiner…does that count?
This is one of those articles you start reading and after a few sentences, your brain goes, “Mmmmm… waffles…”
What’s the point of this thing, exactly?
What will constitute “unattractive”? Will the overweight or people will scars fall into this protected class? If so, if someone hard up for money becomes fat or deliberately disfigures themselves with a scar, will they be eligible for government benefits?
Rush Limbaugh talked about “Uglo-Americans” in his first book, The Way Things Ought To Be, which was published back in 1992, almost 20 years ago.
Socialism: The Affirmative Action program for people with an inferiority complex.
Pig-Virus will probably be the poster boy for the campaign to promote the “Ugly- Olympics”.
…………It will be held the day after the special olympics and all the mentally challenged athletes will remain at the stadium to laugh at the Uglies.
Did Obamacare provide for plastic surgery? I know it was going to put a premium on tanning beds.
Now that we’re on the subject, how come the NBA never let’s short, fat, and lazy guys, play professional basketball?
A government mandate against PERCEIVED traits is a government mandate against FREE choice.
Hmmmm. Didn’t know the Ugly Lobby was so powerful in DC.
This article is a nice example of our Godless unmoral society. No more of that ‘beauty is skin deep’ fallacy.
This is because the Left cannot relate to people unless they can oppress them by catorgorize, seperating and dividing them from others and into little test groups.
Here’s the new ‘ISM’ , Faceism. Because if your UGLY, they will sure let you KNOW IT.
All ugly people will now be pointed out as such. This is like rotten kids at the playground, remember them?
STOP putting that picture up. I nearly pooped myself when I paged down and that face was filling my screen. Wow, that is one nasty looking person.
Seems like we’re wasting time here. Let’s just classify everyone as protected rather than a couple of centuries of one-offs.
I could probably get at least a double endemnity: short, ugly, heterosexual, lactose intolerant, southerner. The hits just keep coming.
“Why this disparate treatment of looks in so many areas of life? It’s a matter of simple prejudice.”
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Having a favorite color is a simple prejudice. ‘Falling in love’ is a bias against the rest of the world.
What the left wants is to be able to punish us for expressing our choices.
We discriminate every time we reach for a preferred brand on a store shelf. We CHOOSE what color shirt to put on the in morning. We select whatever suits our fancy on a restaurant menu.
And if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, just who is qualified to determine who is ugly, and who is beautiful? Aren’t those subjective (individual) choices?
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I’m not attractive enough to get the benefits that accrue to the beautiful, but not ugly enough to fall into a protected class. Once again I lose at grievance theater.
Will the wookie be in charge of the fugly police?
Okay, who gets to set the bar for this, huh?
I mean, one man’s (or woman’s) steak is another’s dog food.
I mean, come on. We’ve seen photos of “the beautiful people” in the entertainment industry and models sans their make-up and hairdressers. They can move in and out of this protected class?
What’s the starting point here? What happened to “inner beauty”? You know … Like to some the Corvette was a beautiful car … but the engine was a POS.
This is just a way of protecting those fugly liberal NAGS that are threatened by conservative babes.
Yeah! What HE said!
And we need protections for the STUPID too!
Progressivism recognizes no difference between Objective and Subjective things. There is no good or bad (religion) in objectivity, but everything a Progressive does is for a “good” reason.
Literally everything a Progressive does is to mandate his own value system, his own concept of good and bad, on the rest of the population. He is committing the very crime he accuses the ‘Christian Fundamentalist’ of committing. He is not governing Objectively.
In the ideal Republic, government has ZERO control over individual choice.
In the ideal Progressive system, there is no individual choice. All personal choices are pre-made by an ‘elite’ group of experts.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjectivity
Subjectivity refers to the subject and his or her perspective, feelings, beliefs, and desires. In philosophy, the term is usually contrasted with objectivity.
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This is great news for Debbie Horsefacerman-Schultz.
Yet again the NYT and the Left in general has proven itself immune from parody.
As soon as you thinks up a reductio ad absurdum argument or parody of a Leftist position, it becomes actual proposal.
In response to cigarette bans, I pointed out that the food people were eating was more dangerous than the cigarettes. Presto, bans on Trans-fats.
In response to charges of profiling Islamic looking people, I said “why not just pull the ugly people in for screening”. And Presto! The NYT is on the ugly-is-a-handicap argument.
Shouldn’t obnoxious smelly people be a protected class also? How about dishonest serial killers?
No conflict of interest there.
Perfect visual of a pig from the book “Animal Farm”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm#Pigs
Read “Harrison Bergeron” by Vonnegut for the ultimate consequence of something like this.
We have finally arrived at the end.
Some 40 years ago, consumer advocate, Ralph Nader predicted that “ugly” was the final frontier of citizens rights.
If modern science was able to gene splice Henry Waxman and Ron Paul, you’d have to kill the result. You’d just have to.
The NY Slimes is ugly too…
they are looking for another way to put off their inevitable collapse…
Ugly with your clothes on or off?
Just trying to figure out where I fit in…….I’ll be right back,sounds like Mrs GRIZZ is barfing
Is this a concession that all liberals are ugly, both inside and out?
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Fugly) seen
noddingoinking in approval.How will they handle concentrations of ugly people…like at WalMart or the local Swap Meet? Once we start identifying them publicly, quotas are sure to follow.
Besides being just another useless libturd with too much political power, Waxman has to be one of the FUGliest guys I have ever seen – it’s not much of a stretch to see his face morph into a rodent or even Stripe from Gremlins -
I agree, Harvey. That short story has it all, and starts like this:
“THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.”
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html