Do you know who Thomas Perez is? Probably not. You never voted for him, but he has tremendous power. He was appointed by President Obama to head the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department. That’s long been a position with the potential for societal mayhem if it ever were to come under a radical ideologue. Well, Perez is exactly that, and he’s begun his reign of mayhem:
Did you know the Justice Department threatened several universities with legal action because they took part in an experimental program to allow students to use the Amazon Kindle for textbooks?
Last year, the schools — among them Princeton, Arizona State and Case Western Reserve — wanted to know if e-book readers would be more convenient and less costly than traditional textbooks. The environmentally conscious educators also wanted to reduce the huge amount of paper students use to print files from their laptops.
It seemed like a promising idea until the universities got a letter from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, now under an aggressive new chief, Thomas Perez, telling them they were under investigation for possible violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act.
People like Perez would rather everyone suffer lest one person have some kind of perceived advantage over another:
“We acted swiftly to respond to complaints we received about the use of the Amazon Kindle,” Perez recently told a House committee. “We must remain vigilant to ensure that as new devices are introduced, people with disabilities are not left behind.”
Imagine a society in which there is no incentive to improve technology unless every single human being is immediately given access to it. That is the kind of society Perez is leading us toward. His next target is the Internet:
Now, Perez is at work on a far bigger project, one that could eventually declare the Internet a “public accommodation” under the ADA. That could result in a raft of new Justice Department regulations for disabled access to all sorts of Web sites.
Of course, most Web access problems are already being solved by the market, but that won’t stop the Justice Department’s zealous civil rights enforcer.
