10 Comments

Wondering why comments are disabled in the male circumcision article? I wanted to say I agree with you. Always thought it was a barbaric practice. Some cultures want to do it to little girls, too. People raise a bit of a fuss about that but are silent when it comes to boy babies.

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Oversight. Corrected. Ty for the kudos

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If you’re “lucky” enough to live in CA, like I am, the protections are nearly endless! My husband is disabled (long before COVID) and he thankfully works for a public agency. There is very little they can deny him by way of accommodations. It’s a beautiful thing, really...

(We didn’t make the rules, we just bend them to our benefit!)

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"Lucky" to live in CA. I guess there are silver linings everywhere, if we look. ;)

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That’s a fact, my friend.

It also helps that I was a legal secretary for many years and worked on several ADA cases with my employer during that time. My husband’s HR lady isn’t my biggest fan...but the law’s pretty clear, and there’s already case law relating to COVID and distance work here. 😉👍🏼

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What state are you in? Are you referring to state level case law or federal appeals?

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I’m in California; it’s state cases I looked for (and found) regarding allowing distance teaching as an accommodation. I didn’t need to use the information, but I was ready for a fight, if necessary.

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Care to cite them?

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When I looked through my bookmarks, I naturally can’t find the items I had looked for previously, but maybe there’s something in here you can use. I looked for anything that supported enhanced flexibility for disability accommodations. I was wrong--these aren’t limited to CA only, and I only have what’s publicly available (no fancy databases for me, just Google Scholar), but, FWIW:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/dhe.31201

(Kanter, Arlene S., Remote Work and the Future of Disability Accommodations (July 1, 2021). Cornell Law Review, Vol. 107, Forthcoming): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3895798

https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/hlelj38&div=6&id=&page=

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3912270

A little background: my husband is a tenured community college professor with 20 years on the job. He was disabled around 2008; his disabilities include a neurological condition (dystonia), traumatic brain injury, and severe post-viral chronic fatigue. His neurologist at UCLA has been very supportive, and he managed to work effectively until March 2020, with minor accommodations.

When the jab was mandated, we managed to get an “affidavit of natural immunity” in lieu of a medical exemption for the jab (the neurologist said she “wasn’t allowed”, and our private physician worried for his license, but agreed to the affidavit). Now that he’s learned the online teaching platform, he wants to continue teaching that way (the alternative is a medical retirement). However, the district requires special certification to teach online (this requirement was suspended from March 2020 through August 2022), and the certification requires a special semester-long class to obtain. This is stupid, since he’s been teaching online since the 2020 lockdown. We requested that he be allowed to teach remotely without certification as an accommodation, as he simply cannot do more than is normally required for his job. He ended up being subjected to an evaluation by a panel (which I thought he had failed--it was abysmal), but he recently received his class load for next semester and it’s all online, so huzzah for us. This event is what prompted my research frenzy.

I hope you can find something useful in the links I provided. Regardless of what you charge, you do a great service (I read your post from today). Many attorneys charge upwards around $600/hr, at least around here (So Cal). Cheers!

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