Kill a fat person? It's all their fault.

Imagine this. A driver on a rural road is reckless, loses control of the car, and gets into an accident. A person in the car has hemophilia and starts to bleed out. The ambluance and helicopter rush to the scene but are unable to save the person with hemophillia because they don't have specialized equipment to save them. 

Whose fault is it? The ambluence crew? The person with hemophillia? or the person driving recklessly?

Most sane people would say it was the person driving recklessly.

Not so much a judge and Defense lawyer in Scotland who apparently fined and banned from driving for three years a doctor whose reckless driving killed a 400 lb woman. Apparently the slap on the wrist was for two reasons, one he was a surgeon and therefore served the community and second the woman died because she was fat.  "If the person had been of average fitness they might have survived the injuries caused by the collision." The Judge said.

Average fitness? What does that mean? Did the judge even look at the victim's history or just assume that because she was fat she most not be doing any exercise at all. Perhaps she would have died of a heart attack the very next day!  I mean if the doctor had a terminal cancer patient in the car and his reckless driving killed him, that would be okay right? And what if she was a thin out of shape woman? I don't know the laws in Scotland but in the states if you kill someone through negligence it's called Negligent Homicide. Are future cases going to be judged on the weight of a victim?

This show that even worldwide fat people are treated as second class citizens, moral degenerates, and not worthy of even proper restoration for their death. If you substituted fat for Black, gay, Jewish, disabled, etc, there would be a worldwide outrage. Instead it doesn't matter because she was just a fat woman.

Comments

[Elizabeth]

This really got to me precisely because it doesn't usually matter if the victim is frail, old, sick or anything else. I can't see how fat is any different, and it seems a chilling clear-cut statement of reduced worth of fat people.

[Elizabeth]

I should say "anything else" that makes death from the incident more likely. It's not only fat people who are judged to be worth less, of course.

[Anna]

That is horrific. I feel so sorry for that woman and her family.

How would "basic fitness" have anything to do with the punishment anyway? What if a child were hit? "If the person had been of average height they would have survived."

[Kirsten]

Well, as everyone surely knows, fat people are just worthless. I should know. I'm fat too, and although I've not swallowed that idiology (unlike the dozens of baby flavoured donuts I surely must ingest daily...) if other people had their way, I'd be in worth deficit.

Honestly, I fear the day will come, sooner rather than later, that the world will eerily resemeble Nazi Germany, only instead of Jews being hauled away for disposal, it will be Fatz. Seriously, I really do think it's headed that way, and to be quite frank, it scares me.

[TheSasquatch]

What if he had hit a smoker, or a person with very little muscle mass protecting their bones and organs, or a dangerously underweight anorexic, or someone who doesn't eat enough calcium and so has brittle bones, or someone with a compromised heart due to excess exercise and dieting or, or, or ...

Jesus fucking Christ.

[Shoshie]

Ugh, this is so awful. I feel so sorry for the woman's family. And any other person this surgeon encounters on the road.

But can we please refrain from the Nazi Germany analogies? I'm Jewish, most of my mom's family was murdered during the Holocaust, and comparisons like this trivialize their tragedy. This is awful, but fat people aren't shuttled into death camps.

[fatchicksrule]

Shoshie,

I wasn't comparing this to Nazis, merely stating that there would be more outrage if the Judge had said it was the fault of someone's ethnic background, religion, sexuality, etc.

Lara

[Shoshie]

Lara-

Oh, I totally get what you were saying, and I agree with you! I was responding to Kirsten. The Nazi/Jews/whatever analogies have just been really grating on me lately because they're freaking everywhere.

[Mulberry]

The comparison to Nazi Germany is not to the enormous horror, but lies in how such atrocities arise. A big part of it is the systematic dehumanization of a particular group of people, the socially sanctioned hate that fosters a climate in which members of the hated group are blamed for everything that's wrong with the world, and have their basic human rights trampled underfoot. A bad economy can act as a catalyst.
If there is a better illustration of this process that does not end up invoking Godwin's Law, and can project its ugliness without dissolving it in academic verbiage, I would like to hear it.