Send up a FLARE -- Fat Legal Advocacy, Rights and Education

Problogger is having a contest of sorts in which bloggers are invited to write on their own blogs about their favorite charities, and link to the post in the Problogger "While We're On the Topic of Charity" comments section. One entry will be chosen to receive a $1,000 donation to the specified charity.

My current fave? The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA)'s FLARE Project. That's F-L-A-R-E as in "Fat Legal Advocacy, Rights and Education." The project has three funds established: employment defense, children's advocacy, and activism.

And boy, are they needed.

Case in point: Last Tuesday's Wall Street Journal contained a Q & A column by Perri Capell entitled "Why Weight-Discrimination Cases Pose Thorny Legal Tests." I'd link to the article, but the WSJ's website is by paid subscription only. So here's the gist:

Q: I am a professional woman whose job at an Atlanta-area company was terminated after only one day. The recruiter told me the owner said he didn't like me because I was overweight and had large breasts. A smaller woman with less experience was hired to replace me. Can I fight this?

A:  As you describe it, your prior employer's behavior was offensive and humiliating, but winning a suit would be difficult, say plaintiff's attorneys who specialize in employment issues.

Under Georgia law, it isn't illegal to dismiss someone for weight reasons, says Thomas Mitchell, a partner with Carothers & Mitchell LLC, a Buford, GA firm that practices labor and employment law. (Michigan; Santa Cruz and San Francisco, Calif., and Washington, D.C., have passed laws barring employment discrimination because of weight.)

Capell writes that laws against discriminating on the basis of sex have been used in weight-discrimination cases when weight standards are applied differently to men and women.

But because another woman was hired to replace you, it is unlikely you could file a complaint based on sex discrimination, Mr. Mitchell says.

Get it? We don't know whether this woman moved to Atlanta or quit another job specifically for the new job -- for which she was apparently recruited. But it's possible that was the case. And after one day doing a job for which she was apparently well-qualified and capable, she was fired simply because she was fat. And she has little or no legal recourse, since weight-based discrimination is legal in Georgia -- and most other states. (A Massachusetts state representative, however -- Byron Rushing -- is sponsoring legislation in that state to have weight added to its anti-discrimination law.)

But that's not all that's been in the news recently. On Sept. 26 the Washington (DC) City Paper published a heartrending -- and infuriating, IMO -- article by Joe Eaton on "The Battle Over Heavy T."

Heavy T (a.k.a. Terrell Hunter)  is a 15-year-old fat African American boy who's dropped out of school and is on the lam from authorities who have repeatedly tried to remove him from his home because he is fat. They claim his mother isn't meeting his "medical and emotional needs," and the article says she tested positive for drug use. But the kid apparently had a pretty stable life -- and was still in school -- until he was removed from his home after a severe asthma attack and heart failure. Three years earlier, Terrell had spent six months in a hospital's weight loss program and lost 75 pounds on semi-starvation rations.  Weight he had, of course, regained.

Apparently none of Terrell's caregivers or the many authorities involved in his case were aware of research indicating the health hazards of weight loss and especially "yo-yo" weight loss and regain. (For a good review, see Glenn Gaesser, Ph.D.'s Big Fat Lies.) In short, while everyone seems to be blaming Terrell's health problems on his weight (and his weight on his eating habits), there's a good chance his weight is caused by other factors (including not only genetics but possibly undiagnosed medical problems), and the weight loss may have actually harmed him. When you lose weight you don't lose only fat tissue -- you lose lean muscle tissue as well. Like, um,  tissue in the heart and other organs. How much of the 75 pounds the then-12-year-old child lost was heart tissue?

Not to mention that authorities apparently complain that Terrell's mom isn't making him eat healthily (by which they mean following a low-calorie or low-fat or low-carb weight loss regimen of some kind, NOT truly eating so-called healthy foods -- because how else can they justify giving a child artificially sweetened and empty-caloried Crystal-freakin'-Light, as was apparently done in the hospital) -- but when 15-year-old Terrell is taken from his school to the Child and Family Service Agency for questioning, a staff member drives him to McDonald's for lunch and gives him money to buy "a Big Mac, large fries, and a large Oreo McFlurry to  go."  Is there a double standard here? (Terrell took the food to go, all right -- he ditched the CFSA worker, went home, and never went back to school.)

Other children in the US and the UK have been removed from their homes -- or their parents charged with neglect -- simply because they were fat. Sondra Solovay discusses some of the cases and job-related weight discrimination as well in her excellent book Tipping the Scales of Justice.

The Council on Size and Weight Discrimination (another excellent nonprofit) has information about these issues on its website. And the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance magazine  featured weight prejudice and discrimination (with a particular focus on children) in its Spring 2007 issue.  NAAFA's website lists a history of weight discrimination and its official position here.

So there's my nomination of a timely charitable/nonprofit organization: NAAFA's FLARE Project. (I wish I could link to a specific webpage for the FLARE Project or for donations, but I couldn't find one. I think the NAAFA website is being redesigned.)

Comments

[Kell Brigan]

Could you please give me more information on how these organizations are "excellent." I know the woman behind the Council sometimes attends hearings regarding fatness-related research, but that last public discussion (one article someplace, with a press release) was over two years ago.

FLARE has done nothing -- at least nothing they want to talk to the public about. They're burried in a website that is hurting the movement more than helping it, by making it appear that NAAFA is dead and that no other aspects of fat acceptance exist. (Thanks the Gods for search engines, and people willing to dig a little deeper.)

We need to stop pretending everybody who typed a few sentences on to a website five years ago is worthy of congratulations. We, especially, need to invest our money in organizations that are not just tiny, timid little cliques of five or six people who can't handle the media, have no intention of doing anything on a national or international scale, or who can't even be bothered to update their websites.

FLARE does not exist as anything other than a pipe dream of one or two people. Disagree? Please provide proof of any action they've undertaken in the past year that has involved more than writing a letter and that has been revealed to their investors and their stakeholders, aka. people in the fat acceptance movement that they expect to send them money.

Stop mollycoddling failure and demand real change!!!!!!!!!!