In New Jersey not long ago, I went to play miniature golf with my fiance. I’ll call the place “Golfville.” After we’d paid, we discovered that the course consisted of nothing but flat, straight, unchallenging par-2 holes. I immediately complained to the management, and the response was that a NJ law requires any new miniature golf course to be wheelchair accessible!

In other words, I mused, only crappy miniature golf courses can now be built – which means no one who isn’t handicapped will want to play, effectively killing the pastime – just so a handful of theoretical miniature golf “diehards on wheelchairs” can play.

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I understand the desire to include the disabled in recreational activities, and this is not a bad idea. (I’m sure that if I were wheelchair-bound I’d be complaining about all the things I couldn’t do and all the places I couldn’t go. Would I have the right, however, to demand access to everywhere I feel like going?) What I don’t understand is that the federal government has any business telling mini-golf entrepreneurs what they can and can’t do with their own property, that it can define what a “socially integrated experience” is, and then it can force all of this down everyone’s throat in order to include a small minority which may or may not have any interest in the activity in the first place.

If there were, in fact, a demand for wheelchair-accessible mini-golf courses, wouldn’t businesspeople be building them? The disabled from miles and miles around would descend like locusts upon such places, and their owners would make fortunes! Forced compliance would be unnecessary if the need actually existed.

So, as old mini-golf courses wear out and new ones are built, nine holes out of eighteen will be tepid at best, effectively killing the fun for the non-disabled 99% of players. An alternative would be to build two courses, one for the disabled and one for the non-disabled. Twice as expensive to build, but too bad for the entrepreneur…. Of course, all of this will really improve people’s attitudes toward the handicapped.