While private businesses have been forced under the Americans with Disabilities Act to absorb high renovation costs, the Supreme Court is considering whether an individual can sue the government if a courthouse fails to comply with the building requirements.

The case began in 1997 after George Lane of Polk County, Tenn., lost a leg in a car accident. He was accused of driving on the wrong side of the street and charged with reckless driving.

One of Lane's hearings was to be held on an upper floor of a Tennessee courthouse that had no elevators and was not ADA compliant. Lane says he had to crawl up multiple flights of stairs to get to one of his hearings. When he refused to crawl up the stairs for a second hearing, he was arrested for failing to attend.

Lane sued the government for violating its own ADA requirements. He wants up to $100,000 in damages.

Until now, government buildings have not been targeted by ADA inspectors, notes Greg Perry, author of "Disabling America: The Unintended Consequences of the Government's Protection of the Handicapped," published by WorldNetDaily's publishing division, WND Books.

"If a privately-owned small or large business fails to spend the required $10,000 to over $100,000 to comply with the ADA, you can be assured no Supreme Court decision is needed to shut that business down, impose extreme fines and require the changes before the doors can be opened," Perry said.

Required changes, he said, include "widening doors, aisles, lowering some counters, raising other counters, adding rails, installing ramps, painting wheelchair symbols in the prime parking spaces, installing eye-level wheelchair signs in front of those spaces, changing the toilets, changing the faucets, changing table arrangements, changing all doorknobs and a myriad of other similarly high-cost renovations before you comply with the ADA."

But Lane's case, argued an editorial in the Jackson, Tenn., Sun newspaper "is one of basic human decency."

"Disabled people, regardless of their background or the severity of their disability, should have free and easy access to public buildings," the paper said. "That's a right already guaranteed under the ADA. Yet today, 14 years after its passage, many communities still are slow to comply."

Perry says, however, since the ADA was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1990, he has been studying cases and stories such as Lane's.

"I conclude that not one time do the actual details of an ADA violation justify the law," he said. "Bad law encourages abuse of the law. The ADA is bad law."

He points out Lane has been using an artificial leg since he recovered from the accident but appears without the leg in the only photo he has seen related to the story.

"I wonder why they never show Lane on camera standing upright on his artificial leg?" Perry asked. "It's almost as though showing him with only one leg endears sympathy toward his alleged plight."

The photograph, however, shows Lane holding a crutch.

"One uses a crutch to walk," he notes. "One does not use a crutch to crawl."

Perry pointed out the judge, knowing Lane's disability, offered to move the hearing to the ground floor, but Lane refused, saying he wanted to be treated "like everybody else."

Perry, who was born with only one leg, says he uses an artificial leg to run and rollerblade. He contends the ADA actually harms the people it's supposed to help because it fosters a sense of victimhood and relies on coercion over compassion.

"I don't see 'everybody else' suing the government for $100,000," he said. "I don't see 'everybody else' with artificial legs crawling up steps. I don't see 'everybody else' requiring the installation of elevators in that courthouse."

He also argues, "And whose fault is it that this entire hearing was even being held? Whose fault is it that Lane can no longer walk on one leg? Isn't it Lane who was accused of causing his own accident by driving on the wrong side of the road?"

Perry acknowledges the government should obey its own laws, but insists obeying the law is not the issue.

"The issue here is whether the ADA should have ever become law in the first place," he said. "The law was supposed to end discrimination against the handicapped. Did you see crutches kicked out from under handicapped people before the ADA was passed? That didn't happen."

During arguments before the Supreme Court last Tuesday, Tennessee Solicitor General Michael E. Moore argued Lane's constitutional rights were not violated and that he has no right to take the state to court, the Associated Press reported.

Protestors chanted outside the court, "Justice for all, we won't crawl," the AP said.

Among the crowd was a disabled woman who got out of her wheelchair and crawled across the court plaza with a few supporters before she was stopped at the steps of the court building by court officers.

"This is what Tennessee is going to make us do," Becky Ogle of Knoxville, Tenn., a disability activist, yelled as she began crawling, the AP reported.

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