The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities requires “reasonable accommodations,” a concept that challenges restaurants to rethink not only their physical structure but also their service culture38 . Discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people in restaurants takes many forms: from open hostility towards same-sex couples to microaggressions such as systematically directing these customers to less visible tables. The issue of transgender people using toilets in restaurants is emerging as a new battleground for fundamental rights, testing the limits of human dignity in everyday spaces. “Neosegregation” – a term I propose to describe contemporary forms of exclusion – operates through mechanisms that maintain an appearance of neutrality while producing discriminatory effects. Exclusive membership clubs, referral systems for reservations, dynamic pricing based on customer profiles, and customer ‘curation’ are devices that, without declaring an intention to exclude, produce social homogenisation of spaces. Given this panorama, critical hermeneutics cannot be satisfied with superficial analyses. As Lenio Streck teaches, it is necessary to unveil the structures of meaning that allow discrimination39 . Each justification must be read in its historicity, recognising that apparently technical concepts carry value judgements that, without hermeneutic vigilance, perpetuate exclusions. The interpreter committed to constitutional integrity must ask: what is the substantial difference between yesterday’s “Whites Only” and today’s “Members Only”? Between declared segregation and algorithmic exclusion? The sophistication of the mechanisms cannot hide the continuity of the exclusionary practice. Analysis of cases – from historic sit-ins to contemporary subtleties – reveals that restaurants remain a frontier where decisions are made about who belongs to the political community. The table continues to be a political space par excellence, where the constitutional promise of equality is either fulfilled or betrayed. It is this reality that demands an appropriate legal response: a critical hermeneutics that unveils the new guises and forms of old discrimination, insisting that no technical sophistication can legitimise exclusion from society’s common table. 38 UNITED NATIONS. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 2006. Articles 2 and 9. 39 STRECK, Lenio Luiz. Hermenêutica jurídica e(m) crise. 11. ed. Porto Alegre: Livraria do Advogado, 2020. p. 298-305. 597 FREEDOM OF ACCESS TO RESTAURANTS
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