San Francisco Chronicle - Thursday August 3, 1989
Randy Shilts, National Correspondent

The Americans with Disabilities Act would extend civil rights laws to 37 million Americans with some form of disability. The measure's provisions to include AIDS sufferers have long generated the most controversy. San Francisco and Berkeley already have laws banning discrimination against people with AIDS or those infected with the human immunodeficiency virus.

California lawmakers twice passed similar legislation, but Governor Deukmejian vetoed the bills. Bush's support of the measure, which already had bipartisan backing in Congress, strongly increases the likelihood of the bill's final passage, although the U.S. Chamber of Commerce remains opposed to it.

After Bush's announcement, the ranking Republican on the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, Orrin Hatch, D-Utah, announced that he will co-sponsor the measure, and it passed the panel unanimously.

A statement released at the White House yesterday said Bush's support reflects the president's commitment to "bringing persons with disabilities into the mainstream, including full participation and access to all aspects of society." The Bush statement did not mention the AIDS-related aspects of the legislation, and no senator referred to AIDS during the committee session.

CAMPAIGN PROMISE

However, the endorsement fulfills a campaign promise Bush made in the Bay Area in June 1988, days after President Ronald Reagan's AIDS commission supported nondiscrimination legislation in its final report. Such anti-bias guarantees have long had the support of most public health officials, the National Academy of Sciences and such leading figures in the AIDS battle as former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.

The measure would forbid discrimination against the disabled by any employer with 25 or more workers. In future years, the requirement would shift to include businesses with 15 or more employees. The bill also would ban bias against the disabled in all public accommodations and would require public transportation, stores, theaters, restaurants and office buildings to undergo "readily achievable alterations" to make them usable by disabled people.

Although the bill does not single out AIDS or any other disease for specific attention, it contains language against disease-related discrimination that has been consistently interpreted by courts to include AIDS and HIV infection.

Compromise on Penalties

The endorsement came after a compromise hammered out by Senate negotiators on specific language regarding the extent to which damages would be allowed in lawsuits filed under the proposed federal law. Under the agreement, victims of discrimination can sue for back pay but not for punitive damages.

In addition, public accommodations guilty of violating the law can be fined civil penalties up to $100,000.

Supporters of the legislation applauded the Bush endorsement and the committee vote as major strides toward passage of the bill. "Both the administration's statement and what Hatch did ensures that this bill has the momentum to not only get passed but to get passed quickly," said Chai Feldblum, legislative counsel to the AIDS Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

MAJOR STEP FORWARD

Urvashi Vaid, executive director of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, called Bush's endorsement "a major step forward in the battle to stop AIDS discrimination." She said, however, that she was disappointed that the president did not mention the provisions relating to AIDS in his statement. "The president needs to take head-on his commitment to end discrimination against people with AIDS," she said.

Most analysts believe that the bill will be approved easily now that it has the Bush imprimatur and the co-sponsorship by such key Republicans as Hatch and Senate minority leader Robert Dole of Kansas.

The bill will go before the full Senate for consideration next month after Congress' summer recess. "From a legal perspective, this perfectly covers both AIDS and HIV infection," Feldblum said.

The chief opponent of the plan has been business. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said most small businesses cannot afford renovations to make their buildings better accessible to the disabled.

RULES WOULD BE PHASED IN

To answer these complaints, the compromise would phase in the rules slowly, and it states that businesses need not suffer an "undue hardship" in making a work site accessible to disabled employees and customers. However, the chamber remains opposed because of what spokesman Fred Krebs called unanswered questions.

"There are 900 categories of disability," Krebs said. "What do you need to provide, if anything, for an employee with AIDS? And what for a deaf employee? It all has to be spelled out." The authority to enforce the bill's civil rights guarantees would fall to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Special correspondent Amy Bayer contributed to this report.

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