Fat acceptance raises some big issues...

It turns out that when a bill is going around the House, it really goes around the House. Hey-o! Seriously, though, there really is a fat acceptance community, and according to the New York Times, they really do think that fat people are being unfairly scapegoated in the national debate over health care reform. There’s no question that fat people get used as scapegoats. Every time a diving board breaks or one end of a park bench shoots straight up in the air, we look around for the fat person. The question is whether this scapegoating is unfair.

Blarg! Gobble! Smack!

It’s an important question, too, because we’re not just talking about a plate of missing brownies, here. According to USA Today—the newspaper that comes with a continental breakfast!—overweight Americans cost the country an estimated $147 billion in medical bills in 2008. As of 2006, 34% of adults in the United States are medically obese, meaning they exceed healthy weight by 30 pounds or more. If you add in those Americans who are simply overweight, the number of fat people increases to two thirds of the population—more if you’ve arrived single at a wedding. The idea of a nation where the majority of people are medically overweight isn’t just embarrassing; it’s vaguely Orwellian. There’s something sinister to the sheer mass* agreement of it, like Brave New World, only with Doritos.