Laws Doomed from the Start - 4 June 1999

You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to notice that in the past few years most of the corners on the sidewalks in New York City are shaved as they slope into the pavement.

But what if you're crippled or otherwise need a wheelchair? Somebody has to tilt the chair up and try not to bump it down.

Now you'll say that in big cities the end or corner of a sidewalk tends to be worn down, which is true - but in New York and other American cities what I'm saying is that many more now are a smooth slope, not because of wear but because lots of them have been shaved or planed down by the city government with wheelchairs in mind.

This is only one of the more obvious signs that in the past 20, 30 years or so we've been thinking more than we did of how to help disabled people do what the rest of us can do with ease. For most of my life, if it ever crossed our mind, we thought it was too bad that paraplegics, for example, simply couldn't go to the movies, find ramps at the entrance to public buildings, nor would invalids expect a special parking place at supermarkets, at church.

This brings us to one of the most remarkable Acts ever passed by Congress - a Disabled Americans Act passed during the Bush administration as a federal law, applying that is to all the states. What could be more admirable, more humane? But we have to look at a menacing "however".

However, this being an American law you may be sure that once the text of the Bill is published whole platoons of lawyers have law school students who will examine it with a microscope and begin to ask what constitutes a disabled person and, next question, disabled from doing what? In no time fairly healthy people who see themselves as disabled will want to know how the law can be made to apply to them.

I don't know why I keep saying will examine, will want to know, they've been doing it briskly all over the place for the past year or two. And most of them were inspired to say why not me by the now celebrated example of Casey Martin - a name totally unknown to fame until two years ago he asked permission to use an electric cart - it's like a mini Mini Moke - to ply his trade, to pursue his livelihood.

And what might that be? Golf. Golf? He's a professional golfer, not good enough to be on tour with the big boys but on what, in baseball, would be called a minor league.

Now Casey Martin suffers from a painful and debilitating disease of the legs. And in the minor tournaments he's played, he's been allowed to use an electric cart. I think I ought to say for non golfers that these electric carts are, in this country, as much standard equipment at golf clubs and public golf courses as tees, golf balls or gloves for the left hand only.

Though in England, at any rate, there was great resistance. Thirty years ago the only one in the country was owned by the Earl of Leicester. He'd had it made in Germany, it was about as neat as a Mac truck and it looked like something left over from the Battle of El Alamein.

Well, back to Mr Casey Martin. Two years ago he qualified to play in a tournament in the big league and requested permission to use an electric cart. From whom? The ruling body of the game which, in the United States, is the USGA - the United States Golf Association, which passes on what kind of clubs and balls are legal and illegal. It also has very firm rules against any help you may get from an outside agency like advice from your opponent or holding back the branch of a tree or touching the ball.

Well the USGA said "No" to Mr Martin: golf is a competitive, physical and mental test between players who cannot use artificial or mechanical aids. In top professional golf, walking 18 holes on four consecutive days is part of the competitive test.

Mr Martin appealed to the courts which finally overturned the USGA and at once opened up the question of whether the ruling body of any game is the final authority.

Golfers tend to argue this electric cart point as if it were exclusively bound by the laws of golf. But Mr Martin's appeal is an appeal as much as any other freakish plea in work or play to the Constitution of the United States, and its command that all citizens shall enjoy the equal protection of the laws.

So once Mr Martin was allowed to be the only player in a cart in a big, official, professional tournament, all sorts of people began to wonder if they couldn't be declared disabled and do something they'd been denied.

For instance, why shouldn't a young orchestra conductor of much talent - why should he be turned down because he was deaf? Couldn't he show his stuff with a hearing aid?

And people with minor afflictions - a touch of arthritis, chronic headaches, mental troubles, children with ADS - attention deficit syndrome, what we used to call laziness - have suddenly thought of themselves as disabled within the meaning of the Act and are thinking or are already suing somebody.

Every ingenuity that's arguable will be used to expand the definition of disabled. Mr Casey Martin could go down a legendary hero as memorable as Casey Jones the railroad icon.

The arrival of spring 1999 reminds me it's the 90th anniversary of the introduction of another famous law which was very simple and straightforward and a boon and a blessing, but into which people read all kinds of objectionable features, enough anyway to prevent the passage of the Bill for six years in the House of Commons and in all another 10 years before it became a permanent Act of Parliament.

I'm thinking of Mr William Willett and the simple, brilliant idea he had one day during an early morning ride on a London common - daylight saving. The Bill was introduced in the House spring of 1909. Still peacetime you'll notice, five years away from Armageddon.

It was plain at once it was going to have rough riding. The first objection from churches and others was on moral grounds - it was an interference with God's plan of night and day, really a form of lying.

It took time before enough people reflected that our clocks, just like our counties and our national borders, were not invented by God. One mischievous young MP pointed out that God had been mocked long ago when varying local times had been adopted throughout the country.

"The evil," he said, "is already done."

Then there was the objection that commerce would be badly affected in all the countries that hadn't adopted the new time and - goodness - how about all the business men whose daily lives were arranged according to the opening and closing of the foreign stock exchanges?

One big protest which delayed the second reading of the Bill came from wealthy people who dined late in the evening. The claim here was that ladies looked much better in artificial light. Add the howls of the farmers and, they said, their cows, and it's incredible that in order to down these objections it took six years.

Six years and the suddenly glaring thought that after a Zeppelin had dropped a dud bomb on an old gentleman's egg cup, perhaps an extra hour of daylight would protect citizens who were round and about in the evening. So it was not until a year after the Great War began that Mr Willett's Bill was passed - 1915.

Even then, once the war was over, it expired and we all returned to God's dark purpose. Another 10 years of argument and debate, finally in 1925 the permanent blessing of daylight saving passed into law.

I think, on the other hand, the grossest example of a law that was doomed from the start which would cause simple havoc that absolutely nobody foresaw is the dreadful 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution which prohibited the making and selling and marketing of alcoholic liquors anywhere in the United States.

Its purpose was to keep the people of the United States pure and free from the demon rum - not to mention the demons of whisky, gin and beer - so as to abolish drunkenness. Wine could be made for religions that required it.

Within one year of its going into effect - 1920 - not only was there a striking increase in drunkenness but there arose an underworld empire of crime with different gangs of bootleggers competing to satisfy the increasing appetite for liquor that everybody seemed to have acquired, everybody from bishops to new brides. All that law-abiding citizens could drink was 'near beer' which could not contain more than one half percent of alcohol.

In 1929, incidentally, that young MP who made the mischievous remark about God and daylight was making a tour of California and he had a few typical remarks to make about near beer, and wine-making, which I trust the Library of Imperial History will allow me to quote. By the way the touring Member of Parliament was now a 55-year-old Winston Churchill:

"The giant redwoods fade away, oak and other English-looking trees succeed them, we flash across trout streams and we come into the land of grapes and pause for luncheon at an immense wine factory.

"I forget how many millions of gallons of California wines are stored in the mighty vats of its warehouses. Fermented? Certainly, do not be alarmed it is 'for sacramental purposes only.' The Constitution of the United States, the God of Israel and the Pope - an august combination - protect with the triple sanctions of Washington, Jerusalem and Rome this inspiring scene.

"Nevertheless there is a fragrance in the air of which even the 18th Amendment cannot deprive us. Old World Beer is also brewed and therefore all the alcohol in excess of one half of one per cent is eliminated and cast to the dogs. The residue, when iced, affords a pleasant drink, indistinguishable in appearance from the naughty article but very similar in flavour.

"I was told that sometimes distressing accidents occur in the manufacture. Sometimes mistakes are made about the exact percentage and on one melancholy occasion an entire brew was inadvertently released at the penultimate stage of manufacture to spread its maddening poison through countless happy homes. But, but needless to say, every precaution is taken."

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