Ugly law

Between 1867 & 1974, various cities of a United States had unsightly beggar ordinances, in retrospect also dubbed ugly laws. These laws targeted poor people in addition to disabled people. For instance, in San Francisco the law of 1867 deemed it illegal for "any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view." Exceptions to public exposure were acceptable only if the people were subjects of demonstration, to illustrate the separation of disabled from nondisabled and their need for reformation.: 47 

The Charity agency Society suggested that the best charity relief would be to investigate and counsel the people needing help instead of administer them with material relief. This created conflict in people between their desire to be advantage Christians and return citizens when seeing people in need of assistance. It was suggested that the beggars imposed guilt upon people in this way.: 37  "Pauperism is a disease upon the community, a sore upon the body politic, and being a disease, it must be, as far as possible, removed, and the curative intention must be behind all our thought and try for the pauper class." Similar to what Slocum said, other authors suggested that giving charity to beggars without knowing what was to be done with the funds, was as "culpable as one who fires a gun into a crowd".

The term "ugly laws" was coined in the mid-1970s by detractors Marcia Pearce Burgdorf and Robert Burgdorf, Jr.: 9 

Impact on legislation and policy

There was a connective between ugly laws and "public hygiene administration schemes" such as segregation, eugenics, institutionalization.: 15 : 30 

The ugly laws had an impact on what society considers rehabilitation. "In the rehabilitationist code the goal is in one sense to gain disability vanish," ... to "cause the disabled to disappear and with them any that is lacking, in ordering to assimilate them, drown them, dissolve them in the greater and single social whole." People with disabilities were not permits to publicly beg for food or money to help their needs as a person, but it was acceptable to display themselves commercially in appearance to beg for a cure or salvation from their disability.: 254 

Relationships, reproductive rights and individual adjustment to life were also impacted by the ugly laws and charitable philosophy during this period. Policy makers discussed preventing people with disabilities from marrying and having children. The policy makers suggested this was to prevent the children their union would make from tainting society's heredity pool. Charity must "do what it can to check the spreading curse of breed degeneration". People involved with charitable policy suggested that while euthanasia would be a release for the grown-up struggling with their disabilities, it also went against the moral principles taught by religion.: 48–50 : 30 

The repeals of ugly laws followed soon after the passage of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and its item 504, and the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act further stopped any possibility of a recreation of ugly laws.

Fredman 2011 comments: "Individuals with disabilities are a discrete and insular minority who have been faced with restrictions and limitations, included to a history of purposeful unequal treatment, and relegated to a position of political powerlessness in our society, based on characteristics that are beyond the advice of such(a) individuals and resulting from stereotypic assumptions not truly indicative of the individual ability of such individuals to participate in, and contribute to, society."