Some teabagger pols in Maine want to repeal the state's seat belt law, because of the ficticious freedom to seriously injure yourself on public highways.
yingyang had a diary today about this, that inspired me to write about how the first seat belt law in the country was enacted, despite proto-teabagger opposition.
More, below.
Way back in 1984, I was working for the New York Public Interest Research Group in Albany. Gov. Mario Cuomo had proposed raising the drinking age from 18 to 19 as a lifesaving measure. NYPIRG, whose primary constituency is college students, naturally opposed raising the drinking age.
Rather than just opposing that for the obvious reasons, I thought that if we could come up with an alternative that saved more lives, we could have a double-win.
That alternative was a mandatory seat belt law, that after some relatively painstaking pre-Internet research, I found had been enacted in most Canadian provinces, and would certainly save far more lives in New York than alleged for raising the drinking age by a year.
We passed this research to allies in the Assembly, and they wrote up a bill, which passed through the Assembly and the Senate (with the help of the insurance and health care industries), and Cuomo signed it.
But there was plenty of vociferous opposition of the freedumb variety, which was, in retrospect, government-hating tea party types before they got that Fox "News"/talk radio-propagandized brand in 2009.
I don't have files from 30 years ago, but this story from back then shows that what we now call the tea party base has been around for decades.
AFAIK, there was no organized opposition to the seat belt law, but there were plenty of angry white guys who reacted to news reports about the impending law (emphases added):
Within days of signing the bill, Cuomo's office was inundated by mail bitterly attacking the governor for breaching personal freedoms. About 5,000 letters were received and fewer than 50 had anything good to say about the law.
''They were offended,'' Cuomo said of the letter writers, adding with a smile that the most defiant were ''NRA National Rifle Association hunters who drink beer, don't vote and lie to their wives about where they were all weekend.''
New York Assemblyman Vincent Graber, who sponsored the seat-belt legislation, said he received about 2,000 critical letters, many from well-educated professionals.
''Every day there were letters to the editor in newspapers,'' he said. ''Hate letters came to my house telling me I was a Nazi.''
At one point, Graber said he was forced to call in the state police after receiving a bomb threat scribbled in crayon.
Give Cuomo pere some credit here for dissing the wingnut base harder than any Democrat today would, and getting re-elected twice after doing so. And Graber's "scribbled in crayon" story foretells the "morans" level of the tea party's intelligence.
The story also notes that seat belt usage soared almost immediately -- from 15 percent to about 70 percent -- and that road deaths declined by 45 percent.
The drinking age was not raised that year, but in NY and everywhere, it eventually rose to its absurd 21, largely because politicians know that 18- to 20-year-olds are a minuscule percentage of voters.
Though that's where it started, where it ended is far more important.
I will always be proud that I helped enact the first seat belt law in the country.
And that seat belt laws in NY and elsewhere have changed the culture and saved many thousands of lives in the last 31 years.
No tea party politician or activist can say that.