SOUTH CAROLINA - Upstate senators won’t support motorcycle helmet bill

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http://www.independentmail.com/news/2012/jan/11/upstate-senators-wont-support-motorcycle-helmet-bi/
Upstate senators won’t support motorcycle helmet bill
 By Jennifer Crossley
 Howard Anderson
Independent Mail 
ANDERSON — Gov. Nikki Haley has the support of Upstate senators and motorcycle rights advocates who say it’s not the government’s responsibility to police personal safety by tightening the state’s motorcycle helmet law.
Haley has promised to veto a bill by Sen. Ralph Anderson, a Democrat from Greenville, that would require all motorcyclists to wear helmets, regardless of age. The current law requires that only riders younger than 21 wear helmets. The bill was read in Senate for the first time Tuesday and has been referred to the transportation committee. In 1967 an all-inclusive law was passed, but it was loosened in 1980 and has remained unchanged since then.
Anderson could not be reached Wednesday.
Around eight Anderson bikers went to Columbia this week to lobby against the bill, said Judy Diaz, coordinator for the Anderson chapter of A Brotherhood Against Totalitarian Enactment.
She is confident that the bill will not make it to Haley.
“We have a lot of legislators who feel the same as we do or at least know that we’ll go down there and make our presence known,” she said. “And they will choose not to endorse it because of that.”
Haley met with biker rights lobbyists Tuesday on the steps of the State House, where she promised them she would veto the bill.
The matter boils down to giving the people want they want, said Republican Sen. Larry A. Martin of Pickens. He rode a motorcycle in the 1960s, and said he never considered not wearing a helmet.
But bikers have made it clear that they want to retain their right not to wear one, and as their representative, he said, he must listen.
“I certainly wouldn’t want to ride one without a helmet, but I don’t want to impose a law if they don’t want it,” he said. “I simply don’t choose to revisit that, and with the governor quite obviously indicating that she would veto a bill I just don’t see the reason to waste the time on it.”
Matters such as roads, pension and the state budget are more pressing, he added.
Sen. Kevin Bryant of Anderson, a Republican, said an emergency room doctor told him that bikers who die not wearing helmets make up many organ donors.
But he concluded it is the biker’s choice whether to wear a helmet.
“If you’re 21, and if you’re foolish enough not to wear a helmet in my opinion it’s not the government’s place to make you,” he said. “We can’t outlaw stupidity.”
In 2011, the majority of motorcycle fatalities in the counties with the most deaths were riders not wearing helmets, according to statistics from the state Department of Public Safety.
Bryant said that the issue is a complicated one and that he does not think it’s fair that taxpayers often pay for medical bills resulting from wrecks involving riders not wearing a helmet.
“That’s unfortunate,” he said. “I don’t know how we get around that.”
Diaz insists that she and other members of A Brotherhood Against Totalitarian Enactment are not opposed to helmets, but they want to be able to choose to wear them.
“We prefer instead of safer crashes safer highways,” she said.
Automobile drivers often bear as much responsibility for wrecks as motorcyclists she added.
The bill raises the issue of where the right of the government ends and personal freedom begins.
“There is a fine line there,” Martin said. “There’s no question about that. The seat belt law is a good example of that.”