Leadership Quote by John McCarthy

McCarthy’s line is a neat piece of political jiu-jitsu: he reframes a zoning-and-environment fight about golf courses as the same old cultural scuffle over who gets to occupy public space. By pairing golf (coded as affluent, orderly, “responsible” leisure) with skateboarding (coded as youthful, noisy, “disruptive” recreation), he forces the listener to notice the symmetry most debates try to hide. The effect is to puncture the moral hierarchy that often sneaks into municipal policy: some forms of play are treated like community assets, others like nuisances.

The key word is “motivations.” McCarthy isn’t arguing that the objections are factually identical; he concedes “the rationalizations are different.” That’s the tell. He’s suggesting the stated reasons - water use, habitat loss, property values, liability, noise - are post-hoc justifications for a deeper impulse: control. Control over aesthetics, class signals, and the kinds of bodies allowed to be visible in a neighborhood. In that sense, “forbid” is doing extra work, hinting that these aren’t neutral regulations but moralized campaigns.

Contextually, it reads like a defense against selective outrage. If a town can mobilize to ban skateboarding under the banner of safety, it can mobilize to block golf under the banner of conservation. McCarthy’s wager is that both movements are driven less by principled policy than by discomfort with a subculture - whether that subculture wears collared shirts or scuffed Vans. The cynicism lands because local politics is often exactly that intimate: ideology expressed as landscaping.