Of all the STUPID, Idiotic Ideas, this is THE top!

BEING good-looking is useful in so many ways.

In addition to whatever personal pleasure it gives you, being attractive also helps you earn more money, find a higher-earning spouse (and one who looks better, too!) and get better deals on mortgages. Each of these facts has been demonstrated over the past 20 years by many economists and other researchers. The effects are not small: one study showed that an American worker who was among the bottom one-seventh in looks, as assessed by randomly chosen observers, earned 10 to 15 percent less per year than a similar worker whose looks were assessed in the top one-third — a lifetime difference, in a typical case, of about $230,000.

Why this disparate treatment of looks in so many areas of life? It’s a matter of simple prejudice. Most of us, regardless of our professed attitudes, prefer as customers to buy from better-looking salespeople, as jurors to listen to better-looking attorneys, as voters to be led by better-looking politicians, as students to learn from better-looking professors. This is not a matter of evil employers’ refusing to hire the ugly: in our roles as workers, customers and potential lovers we are all responsible for these effects.

How could we remedy this injustice? With all the gains to being good-looking, you would think that more people would get plastic surgery or makeovers to improve their looks. Many of us do all those things, but as studies have shown, such refinements make only small differences in our beauty. All that spending may make us feel better, but it doesn’t help us much in getting a better job or a more desirable mate.

A more radical solution may be needed: why not offer legal protections to the ugly, as we do with racial, ethnic and religious minorities, women and handicapped individuals?

We actually already do offer such protections in a few places, including in some jurisdictions in California, and in the District of Columbia, where discriminatory treatment based on looks in hiring, promotions, housing and other areas is prohibited. Ugliness could be protected generally in the United States by small extensions of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Ugly people could be allowed to seek help from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and other agencies in overcoming the effects of discrimination. We could even have affirmative-action programs for the ugly.
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OK, I'll admit it openly. I an NOT Brad freakin' Pitt!! I range somewhere between average, and
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"...did you SEE that guy!".
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On top of that, for most of my life, I've had long hair, a beard, and I'm a big dude. Frankly, people ask me often,
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"...what kind of Harley do you ride?!"
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(I don't, sadly own a 'hog') So I do have a non-traditional 'look'. Having said this, when I've worked I never had trouble getting or keeping jobs. I competed on my experience, my schooling and on my recommendations from prior employers.
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What I did NOT need was a law or rules from EEOC to GET a job or a place to live. The idea of adding, frankly, the MAJORITY of the population to the rolls of peole who qualify for EEOC oversight. It is, in my mind, about the last step toward Ayn Rand's vision of the world in "Atlas Shrugged".
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Everybody NEEDING government help, daily, to get by.
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Schteveo