The Fat Lady Stings

In most parts of America, not to mention the world, a 200-pound-plus woman who was suing after being turned down as a dance-fitness instructor would not be thought to have a strong case. But most of America remains well behind San Francisco, whose increasingly numerous laws include a new one protecting the horizontally and vertically challenged from job discrimination.

So when the fitness chain Jazzercise last summer refused to certify 240-pound Jennifer Portnick as an instructor because she lacked a "fit appearance," she took her case to the city's Human Rights Commission. And this week a jubilant Ms. Portnick used the occasion of the 10th International "No Diet Day" to announce that Jazzercise had agreed to drop a requirement that its instructors look fit. She called it, naturally, a "civil rights victory."

Ms. Portnick's case was the first test of the city's new ordinance, which came about partly in reaction to a now-infamous health club billboard that read, "When the aliens come they'll eat the fat ones first." Another pending case was filed by a mother whose daughter was rejected by the San Francisco Ballet because she was short and muscular rather than long and lean. In the meantime, we now have almost daily headlines reporting an "epidemic" of obesity, the growing incidence of diabetes in overweight children and a Surgeon General announcing that 61% of us could stand to shed a few pounds.

If we follow the tobacco logic, we're surely not far from the day where a 300-pound man could sue McDonald's on the grounds that its cheeseburgers were too tasty to resist. If, however, we follow the logic of the anti-fat ordinance, Rosie O'Donnell could sue for not getting the role in the movie "Pretty Woman" that went to Julia Roberts. If we follow California logic, no doubt, we'll get both.

Updated May 8, 2002