In politics, doing what is important is hard. Therefore the important things often are passed over in favor of what is unimportant and therefore easy.

And however miniscule the cause, someone always will be available to devote his life to it.

And so it is in real life, too.

The Channel Islands off the California coast are an archeologist's playground. There, under grassy hillocks and sand dunes are the fossilized remains of an army of wooly mammoths. And these aren't just any mammoths, mind you. These are the oxymornically named pygmy mammoths.

The pygmy mammoths were less than half as big as their full size counterparts. They evolved down to their diminutive size after rising sea levels shrank the islands and smaller food supplies demanded smaller mammoths.

For me, that's all I'd ever need to know about these wee woolies.

But for some people, that's not even close to all there is.

Archeologists have spent their entire professional lives studying the life and times of these 6-foot evolutionary offshoots.

For them, an intact scapula is as beautiful as a Rembrandt, and a fossilized pile of 15,000 year-old dung is a new universe waiting to be discovered.

Now I find no mystery in animal bones or dung of any age. It is just my way.

But whether I'm interested matters not at all.

If these professors' benefactors and the universities they work for approve, then they are good to go, spading around in loamy soil for stray tusks.

Similarly, as long as you keep reading and my employer keeps paying, I will keep writing about West Virginia politics. I don't suppose pygmy mammoth excavators take much interest, and some might even say that mine is trivial work compared to unlocking the secrets of early man and the extinction of the early mammoths.

But we can both follow our own paths, content that our passions have merit because they do. It's just that sometimes your lifetime of work is only a five-minute fascination for someone else.

That there are so many of us working so diligently on so many different passions is perhaps the finest proof of the gifts our creator gave us.

Or as they would say in Ventura, you can do whatever is cool with you, man.

But where that line ends is when someone's passion is to make other people do things. I talk often, and usually derisively, of do-gooders, and this is exactly what I mean: people who know what's best for you.

There are good do-gooders. When Winston Churchill was trying to convince an unwilling Britain to face the Nazi menace, he was doing what was right. When Gandhi was trying to convince an unwilling Winston Churchill and his people to leave India, he also was doing what was right.

As Andrew Jackson said, one man with courage makes a majority. And it always takes courageous men to make the difference.

But in today's political world, that is the exception.

Consider two issues in the news in West Virginia today: racial profiling and breast feeding.

Seriously.

A handful of lobbyists and legislators (do-gooders) decided a few years ago that West Virginia shouldn't miss out on racial conflict just because we have so precious little of it.

Their bill that would force police officers to record the race of every person they stop or question got laughed off as busy work inspired by a tendentious view of events.

But that just made those folks more convinced of their rightness.

So they shamed other lawmakers, always offering the implicit threat of racism to those who resisted. In time, even a sensible politician will decide that they would rather vote for a bad bill once than against for five years -- especially when they know the bill is basically meaningless, just more clutter in our code.

So starting this month, police officers are being forced to guess the race of the people they talk to. They aren't supposed to ask because that would be offensive, so they are just supposed to take a stab at it.

We know that this law will cause police to not question some suspects for fear of being labeled profilers. We also know that the guesstimated races recorded will provide not useful information and eventually hurt feelings and lawsuits.

Less effective cops and more lawsuits -- no wonder liberals like it.

But by bullying from a position of self-styled moral superiority on a meaningless issue, they win.

The new issue of phony moral outrage being foisted on us is breastfeeding. While women have managed to do this without government intervention for millennia, we are told that there is nursing.

It's another perfect do-gooder issue. They can create a phony crisis and offer a solution that empowers and vindicates them. And those who oppose them can be shouted down as sexist or, gasp, anti-child.

It's a national movement, and all but eight states have succumbed to the cry for breastfeeding on demand. The bill died in West Virginia again last year, but the "lactivists" (yes, they call themselves that) already are pushing hard.

What they want is to require that anyone who allows the public into their establishment must allow breastfeeding anyplace on the premises. No exceptions.

The manager at the Radio Shack is free to tell me I can't eat a steak hoagie while browsing for cell phones. He is also free to tell me that while the store has a bathroom, it is not for customers.

I might leave hungry and in some distress, but that's his right. Just as it is my right not to shop at Radio Shack.

But the soldiers of lactation think shopkeepers shouldn't have the right to dictate their customers' behavior, and since only a monster would say their constitutional rights are more important, you'd better agree.

And in time, scared lawmakers, especially ones with some anti-feminist baggage, will succumb to the threats and pass the law.

But for all of you who consider my concerns just so many pygmy mammoth bones in the sand dune of government, consider this: There are enough pushers of petty outrage on all sides to make sure our already overwhelmed lawmakers never see straight.

Lobbyists are forever begging for everything from hikes for the greyhound breeding fund to the right of babies to nurse in electronics stores that things like the tax code and decisions on road projects have to wait and wait and wait.

The easy work always gets done before the hard. Our legislators' soft hands are killing this state, and the "lactivists" and their ilk are helping them do it.

Chris Stirewalt can be reached by e-mail at cstirewalt@statejournal.com.