She qualified for the title of "the most ugly" I've ever met. What made things 10 times worse was her snarling personality, but who could blame her? There was this pretty reporter who wouldn't consider being nice to the ugly administrator for a second. I once pointed out to this attractive (and deeply entitled) reporter that she should forgive the ugly woman for her snippish ways because she was ugly, but she wasn't having any of it.

That's the problem with entitlement -- most of the time it doesn't recognize itself the nose on its face. (And for those wondering about me, a miiddling 'meh'. )

Thus, we arrive at a New York Times essay that floats the idea of whether "ugly people" should get special protections under the law. In a piece entitled, "Ugly? You May Have a Case," University of Texas, Austin, Economics Professor Daniel S. Hamermesh points out that attractive people will earn 10 to 15 percent more per year than similarly employed but less attractive workers -- "a llifetime difference, in a typical case, of about $230,000." He poses a radical solution to amend this tax on ugly.

"Why not offer legal protections to the ugly, as we do with racial, ethnic and religious minorities, women and handicapped individuals," asks Hamermesh, whose new book Beauty Pays will be released this month.

"Economic arguments for protecting the ugly are as strong as those for protecting some groups currently covered by legislation,'' Hamermesh writes. "So why not go ahead and expand protection to the looks-challenged?"

Why not? There's no reason -- except that minorities, women, the elderly already have a hellish time proving their discrimination cases of in the court of law. Collectively our nation's taste for fairness seems to have gone out the window with the advent of the Darwinian President Ronald Reagan, and it's only gotten worse with the intolerant Tea Partiers. And God forbid we point out any evolutionary benefits to favoring pretty over ugly lest without launching the tiresome "science versus religion" debate that crops up every time the left and right disagree. The faithful, the atheist, the science worshippers -- can't we all get along?

I'm all for the ugly getting their due in court, but in contemporary cruel America, I think they have fat chance at that.