Seriously, if I'm a businessman and have a medical condition that's fucking up my career because I can never board airplanes safely, because of something as silly and trivial as serving peanuts, something's wrong. The fact that peanuts are so nonessential (and in fact, barely consequential at all) to an airline's ability to serve its customers is important here. It would be quite easy and probably just about costless for airlines to switch over to food that doesn't contain such a common allergen, which is probably why they're actually doing it.
Again, I honestly could care less about the peanuts. It's another P I'm concerned about. Precedence.
There need not be a "trickle down effect" because they are not the same type of business; slippery slope logic need not apply. An airplane is a method of transportation that many people rely on fairly regularly; it would be a serious detriment to their life to be unable to ever board a plane safely.
You were just arguing that the scent of peanut oil alone can trigger an attack. In lawsuit happy America, I definitely worry about the slippery slope even when solid logic tells me I shouldn't. Because we're just that damn.....American.
I understand your concerns about precedence here, but any competent judge (which isn't to say all judges are competent) would have to take into consideration the relevant facts instead of jumping to conclusions and sliding down a slippery slope. Precedent isn't meant to give an excuse for another case to be ruled the same way just because it's superficially similar, and in the few times I've read court documents regarding things like this, a lot more analysis goes into it than that.
Not that that'll necessarily stop lawsuits, because damn near nobody in the US goes into a lawsuit to actually get the courts to find in their favor; it's to get the other person to not want to deal with you enough to settle out-of-court without admitting wrongdoing (or, from the defendant's perspective, it's to shovel money into your own company's lawyers so effectively that you
can just settle out of court instead of ever being found culpable for anything). However, that's honestly a completely different problem there, and shouldn't prevent us from otherwise doing the right thing; what's necessary there is some kind of court reform, or
something (I'm not sure what), but we can't just throw the baby out with the bathwater there.