You, G-L-Y, you ain't got no alibi, you ugly. Yeah, yeah, you ugly. May have heard that cheer

before. I don't know if any cheer leading team has ever actually said that. I'm sure it's

popped up in movies, TV shows, childhood taunts on the playground. But it turns out in the

not too distant past, you did need an alibi. Just the mere fact of being deemed ugly could be considered a crime.

You may not have heard of this before, but it's a fascinating part of American history.

Are the so-called ugly laws, ordinances where someone with a visible disability or disfigurement,

it was illegal for them to go out in public.

So the past was a strange, the past is a strange place. It was fun to go back and look at it and

see what the world was like and be very different from our own. That's what we're going to do

here today, here on the Council of Trent. Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology.

But Friday, we talk about whatever I want to talk about. So today I want to talk about the history

of ugly laws. I'm going to read to you some excerpts here from an article in National Geographic.

The article is called Illegal to be Ugly, Question Mark mark the history behind one of america's

cruelest laws and it certainly is cruel like i mean there's so many other interesting things in the

in the past where you wonder what were they thinking like animals used to be put on trial for

crimes uh you know found found guilty of things and executed for it.

But this is one, the ugly laws.

So we'll go through here, talk a little bit about these laws that came from the mid-19th century.

Some of them lasted all the way up to the middle of the 20th century or even like the 1970s.

So here's what it says.

As cities expanded in public places became more crowded,

there was a growing emphasis on maintaining order and aesthetics and urban environments.

...