I was walking the other afternoon on the beach below the bluffs of Fort Funston, the long-decommissioned military facility that's gained a national measure of fame as a battleground in the great political dog wars of San Francisco. (To leash or not to leash, that is the question.) On this particular Saturday, though, Fort Funston evinced no sign of conflict, canine or other. In fact, it was one of those warm, fogless, fresh days that remind you San Francisco can indeed be the best place on Earth: the Pacific breaking into white sheen on glinting sand; the sky so blue it actually, really, steals your breath; the sunlight slanting out of the sky in a way seen nowhere outside Northern California, a way that seems to make everything, even air and rock, shimmer. And above it all, nearly motionless in the onshore breeze, the hang gliders.
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Fort Funston is something special in the hang-gliding world (or, as one of the planet's more charming euphemisms would have it, "the foot-launched flying community"). As a journalism student revealed to me a few months ago, the winds at Fort Funston are so steady and unrelenting that hang gliders can soar there an extraordinarily high percentage of the time. This particular afternoon, apparently, was good soaring weather even by Fort Funston measure: Three, four -- no, six! -- hang gliders and a parasailor hovered in the brilliant air at once, drifting slightly this way and that, but generally holding station until, very occasionally, one by one, they peeled away in dreamy arcs over the ocean. The soarers seemed effortlessly airborne, the embodiment of the recurring human dream of flying not by mechanical force, but the way birds fly, as a matter of personal decision. And while I watched the gliders, I wondered: Do the Bay Area Paragliding Association's regulations for the Stables (as the Fort Funston hang-gliding port is known) require that reasonable accommodations be made for prospective pilots who weigh more than 300 pounds, and if not, why not?
OK, luring you out to the beach and then dropping the absurdity of weight discrimination law on your head is a journalistic sucker punch, but I couldn't think of a better way to convey the jarring otherworldliness of San Francisco's latest attempt to make human unkindness answerable to the discrimination police. The city's "Compliance Guidelines to Prohibit Weight and Height Discrimination," announced late in August after months of hard work over at the city's so-called Human Rights Commission, explain just what it is we must all do to avoid civil litigation and perhaps even incarceration for treating overweight or underweight or over- or undertall people improperly. (Landlords, in particular, beware: Refusing to rent to the fat because they're fat can bring a jail sentence of up to six months.) The guidelines are not themselves law, just advice from the HRC on complying with the new law. Still, the guidelines read as something a bit more stern than advice. Direct quotation, I think, will best convey the tenor.
In a section titled "Conduct and Demeanor," the commission recommends that employers "require all staff including managers to receive continuing education in weight and height related discrimination issues." And that training had better stick, because "[a]n individual employer, agency, landlord or business establishment must prevent the use of disrespectful language or behavior related to weight or height by its staff, including managers, or by customers and clients at their place of business or while under their control. The person in charge must take corrective action to assure compliance such as telling the person making an offensive remark that the behavior is not allowed."
In the workplace, meanwhile, discrimination in regard to weight or height in any aspect of employment is banned. This HRC dictate apparently extends beyond sheer weight to include, well, shape: "It is not an automatic defense to a charge of weight based employment discrimination that a person of the same weight was hired. For example, it is impermissible to reject a candidate because she carries her weight around her abdomen, in favor of a candidate of the same weight and height who is differently proportioned."
And as you ponder, perhaps for the first time, the notion of discrimination against the potbellied, read this paragraph, which, I predict, will have the owners of hundreds of San Francisco businesses scratching their heads: "An employer may not exclude a person from a "front office' position or any other position because the employee's weight is not in keeping with a professional appearance. The wishes, tastes or preferences of other employees or customers may not be asserted to justify discrimination."
Which leads us to the commission recommendation, in a subsection titled "Standards," declaring that "weight or height standards may not be used unless weight or height is a bona fide occupational qualification. Weight may not be used as a measure of health, fitness, endurance, flexibility, strength, character, or self-control." (By the way, the burden of proving that weight or height is an occupational qualification falls on the employer. And for those of you who must know: Strip clubs and other performance venues have a First Amendment right to choose their "artists" without regard to the weight and height guidelines, an HRC spokesman said.)
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