Your home isn’t your castle
Not the upcoming war with Iran, which I intend to write about when I have a free minute, and not the good news about Ron Paul’s 3rd quarter fundraising caused me to take a short break and write. It was a small news report I run across about two towns in California who plan to extend the ban on smoking:
Lawmakers in two California cities are casting votes this month on unprecedented legislation that would widen a growing voluntary movement by landlords and resident associations to ban smoking inside apartments and condos.
Today in Calabasas, the City Council plans to vote on expanding its anti-smoking law to bar renters from lighting up inside existing apartments. It would exempt current resident smokers until they moved but would require all new buildings with at least 15 units, including condos, to be smoke-free.
[...]
"Fresh air should be breathed by everybody," Belmont Mayor Coralin Feierbach says. She cites a 2006 surgeon general’s report that says no level of secondhand smoke is risk-free.
Honest observer would recognize the similarities to the Prohibition on alcohol and would recognize its unavoidable failure. But even with out the comparison to past assaults on the right of people to use unhealthy substances the arguments for banning smoking in one private house are plain stupid.
One have to wonder if in the name of “no level of secondhand smoke is risk free” the two towns, and those who will soon follow, are willing to stop any cars traffic? I’m sure that any study will demonstrate that the level of smoke inhaled while being in the street is much greater than the level of smoke inhaled while crossing near a smoker’s house.
It will be interesting to see if such legislation will stand the test of the supreme court.
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I'm trying to quit smoking at the moment - down to a half a pack, anyway. I started in my teens (I'm 28 at the moment). I have no intention of defending Phillip Morris and their confederates: I wish I'd never picked up this disgusting habit. I do, however, have a touch of sympathy for the seventy-five million Americans or so who are locked in to nicotine addiction -naturally, as I am one myself. What's been going on for the last 10 years or so, plain and excruciatingly simple, is the Tyrrany of the Majority over the Minority.
That's not democracy. Au contraire, the cornerstone of democracy -and you'll quickly lose it, otherwise- is the protection of the minority from the majority. Without those civil liberty protections in place, you don't have democracy. You have Mob Rule. Just the other day, I read about a group of senior citizens who were being denied donuts "because it's not healthy." Buckle up, don't eat carbs, no smoking, and what else? Where's the line of demarcation? Where is all this teetotalling going to end?
The members of the City Council who came up with this (where else but California, right?) claim -and one reads a little bewilderment between the lines of their remarks - that they've recieved death threats as a result of the legislation they propose. I'm amazed that they aren't down on their fat white knees thanking God that they live in the early 21st century and not the early 20th. A hundred years ago, it wouldn't be a threat. You'd be in a box.
Underpining all of this nonsense is, in my opinion, a very real, a very VALID sense of outrage: "Who do you think you ARE??" Perhaps a better question would be: "WHERE do you think you are?" This is America. Get out of my house.
-David S.
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