Though I’m legally blind, I love watching “Saturday Night Live,” the show that so deftly satirizes politics and culture. But I was appalled when SNL veered from satire into cruelty in a skit ridiculing New York Gov. David Paterson’s blindness.

Last weekend, in the program’s Weekend Update segment, “Saturday Night Live” cast member Fred Armisen portrayed Paterson as a bumbling, disoriented Mr. Magoo like character.

The fake Paterson didn’t know what direction to face when he arrived on the Weekend Update set, held a chart containing unemployment figures upside down and later, talking on his cell phone, stood in the way of the camera.

For good measure, Armisen mimicked the physical characteristics of Paterson’s blindness by squinting his right eye to keep it closed and making his left eye look askance.

When asked about his plans for appointing someone to fill the Senate seat that will be left vacant when Sen. Hilary Clinton becomes Secretary of State, Armisen said, “I’m tired of all those fancy two-eyed smart alecks running the show.” The appointee could be “someone with a gamey arm,” he added.

Most of us who are blind or disabled can take a joke. Like Paterson himself, we often use humor to make able-bodied people more at ease with our disability.

But this was gratuitous.

Prejudice, fueled in large part by ignorance, against people with blindness and other disabilities is pervasive in this society.

Blindness is a physical limitation, and those of us who are blind manage to cope with it. We know how to make public presentations. We wouldn’t hold a chart upside down at a meeting or block a camera in a TV studio.

The skit suggested that blind people are incompetent, a prejudice that Gov. Paterson fought against his whole life.

It is just this prejudice that sets blind and disabled people back.

The unemployment rate among blind and disabled people is 70 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“There is only one way that people could have an unemployment rate that’s six times the national average – it’s attitude,” Paterson said when asked for his reaction to the “Saturday Night Live” skit, “And I’m afraid that this kind of third-grade depiction of individuals and the way they look and the way they move add to that negative environment.”

“Saturday Night Live” owes Paterson — and all blind people — an apology.

I hope to hear it soon, so I can again look forward to hearing “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night.”

Kathi Wolfe is a writer and poet.