Justice Scalia Double Bogeys
Bob Schieffer is CBS News' Chief Washington Correspondent and moderator of the Sunday news discussion program Face The Nation.
So the Supreme Court has ruled that Casey Martin, the professional golfer who can hardly walk, can use a cart to get from hole to hole. This has given some golf purists the vapors, but my guess is that the old game will survive.
It may even make the game more popular. Overcoming adversity and the odds has always been big box office. Just check the renewed interest in women's golf this week when a golfer who was eight months pregnant and a thirteen-year-old girl qualified for the women's open. That means big TV ratings, and big ratings mean bigger prizes. The pros will learn to live with that.
Still it is a complicated issue over which reasonable people can disagree. The Court ruled seven to two in Casey Martin's favor.
What bothered me was the way Justice Scalia disagreed. He let go a sarcastic dissent that deserves attention not so much for its logic as for its callousness.
Now that Martin can use a cart, he wrote, "one can envision the parents of a Little League player with attention deficit disorder trying to convince a judge that their son's disability makes it at least 25 percent more difficult to hit a pitched ball."
No, I can't envision that, because I fail to the see the parallel. But then, I'm not a lawyer.
But I am a father. What I can envision is how the parents of children with learning disabilities must feel when they are held up to ridicule by a justice of the Supreme Court.
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