You Can't Do That Here: Legislated Morality?

Bars in Ohio “ain’t what they used to be” thanks to the passing of a one-size-fits-all law that bans smoking in public establishments. Those who enjoy smoke with their suds are told that they can’t smoke inside a bar and they can’t drink outside.
There are three options available for those caught in the smoker’s dilemma. One is to break the law and face fines and/or incarceration. One is to travel to another state and imbibe where such laws don’t exist. A third is to buy alcohol at the local drugstore or drive though and take it home.
The first option, reduced to its own absurdity, contributes to the overpopulation of prisons, a condition that must allow release of pedophiles, drug vendors and wife-beaters in order to make room for smokers. The second allows other states to to collect tobacco and alcohol revenues while Ohio gets the expense of cleaning sot started wrecks off the freeways. Now any government worth its salt knows that taxing addicts is a sure source of income. The third option raises the question of when legisilated morality will totally obliterate anyone’s privacy.
Our local newspaper, “The Canton Repository” offered a sane solution to the problem. It editorialized let there be smokers only bars. Non-smokers need not attend. This suggestion fell on the deaf ears of moralists who demand big-brother scrutiny of what others do, coupled with an attitude of yes, “there will be no more cakes and ale”.
No one since Everett Koop’s warnings on cigarette packages, circa the 1960s, can deny that inhaling tobacco smoke is toxic. We know the Marlboro Man died of lung cancer. We know the effects of second-hand smoke. We realize there must be steps taken so that one person’s indulgence does not amount to another person’s problem.
I was born in the deep South, in a clime that is only recently digging out of its deep doodoo of publically accepted racism. In that clime, in my day, folks were known to eat hog fat, drink hard liquor, smoke and dip snuff and live to be 90. But they had clean air and clean water. Nowadays, one can stand on the street corner of any major Southern city and breathe in CO equivalent to that found in a pack of cigarettes in fifteen minutes.
That cigarette smoking begins with vanity and ends with addiction is an assumption based on ignorance of the history of smoking in the US and of the psychological needs that cause it. Smoking begins with wanting to fit in with one’s peers. As a teen, when your mom said,“If all your friends jumped over a cliff, would you?”, your heart of hearts said, “Sure would. What’s life without friends?” In my day smoking began with the need of peer approval plus admiration for those great WWII veterans with their Lucky Strikes and for movie stars who smoked. Now, I hear that smoking is to be banned from movies. Just imagine seeing a movie about a thug who can show you how to slice someone’s throat neatly, but cannot light up!
The Wiccan commandment that goes “do as you will so long as it harms no one” is the best way to consider smoker’s rights or wrongs. And if my sense of the quality of life includes having unhealthy addictions, quantity of life is the least of my worries.

Your Take?

Precisely.

Smoking is “morally wrong” and “damaging to children” and and and …

But childrens cartoons and shows filled with sexual inneundo is perfectly acceptable.

Children seeing slasher flicks about rape, drugs and unchecked psychosis are just part of the culture.

Music that promotes nothing but drug addiction, rape, murder and mindless violence is freedom of expression ~ as long as the only racist terminology used in the music is by the accepted group of racists ~ double bind for the mind of a child.

Everyone’s a victim and we need the government to tell us what habits to have, when to have them, and what is morally correct.

But it is not socialism, no, a smoking ban is democracy in action. At least that’s what my employer says.

fourth option. shoot all lying liberal totalitarians in the head and blow smoke through their skulls.

[size=200]VIVA LA REVOLUTION!!![/size]

-Imp

M.,
Don’t give the thought police any good ideas! :smiley: Follow up. Washington Journal call-ins, 8/10/07. A statistic was given stating that increased taxes on cigarettes meant decreased consumption of cigarettes. As my daughter in her bratish stage would respond, I say, “Duh.” The children of the 60s children have moved on to crack cocaine and meth amphetamines–better solutions to witnessing belonging in worlds gone mad.
Now Ohio is trying to ban lap dancers!
Imp.,
I’m glad you have a good adversary to blame for all of society’s evils. I’ve never found one. As Pogo Possum noted, “We have met the enemy and he is us!”

not all of society’s ills, a vast majority, but not all…

willing slaves to government are the enemy indeed…

-Imp

If the government is not us, we are in dire need of a revolution. Our Constitution calls for it. See Thoreau. If I need an enemy to verify my existence, I’m a poor defender of human rights as recognized in the Declaration of Independence.

the liberal talking heads are not us… and yes, the revolution is a coming…

we had a tea party for less

-Imp

The conservative talking heads are not us either. We need consensus of compassionate, unifying ideologies, not homophobic, class warring or other futher divisive (by means of inflammatory statements) estrangements from each other.

Ierrellus,

But that wouldn’t be the core of a revolutionary movement. It is the warring, divisive extremists that bring revolution… Look historically at any large scale revolutionary movement and tell me how many were made up of “compassionate unifying ideologies”. Those who foment revolution are neither compassionate nor unifying. They are the extremists (like Imp). :laughing:

Ohio also allows companies to discriminate against smokers for employment. Reynolds&Reynolds will not hire anyone who smokes, and yes, they will have you tested. But you can be an alcoholic or drug addict … that’s okay, as long as we aren’t going socialist as a country.

If they ban lap dancers, we might as well just go full mad Puritan Socialism and hand the keys to the White House over to Putin, it isn’t like Bush is doing anything useful while he’s there … just an illiterate vagrant.

Even if you don’t like what Imp has to say, he makes me laugh my ass off.

I’m not certain he could be a revolutionary, even his followers wouldn’t know how to take him …

And how many liberals or taxmen have you shot? Do you ever back up your shitty posts with action, or do you just sit at home stroking your neckbeard while cracking one off at the thought of the Turner Diaries coming true?

PS - “Revolution” is not a word in Spanish. “Revolución” however, is.

thank you for the spanish speeling lesson.

:wink:

-Imp

Hmm., another thread derailed by inflamatory off-topic comments.

As for banning smoking, they did it in the town where I go to college, and the damn bar owners are the one’s who enforce it. If they don’t get on board, then the law becomes irrelevant. Also, according to Penn and Teller’s “Bullshit” there is no evidence showing that second hand smoke causes harm. A large study done by the FDA showed no statistical difference. However, this document has been subject to wholesale misinterpretation because the people exposed had a statistically unimportant increase in disease, but an increase non the less. Inconclusive.

And what if it had been conclusive, and there really was no evidence showing that second hand smoke causes harm? Are you suggesting that everyone should be allowed to play loud music in a bar (or anywhere else) if the sound does not cause damage to other people’s eardrums?

No, I’m suggesting that smoking in a bar is as normal as drinking in a bar, and outside of niche bars where smoking is banned by the owner, every single person knows what they’re getting into when they go to a bar, it’s part of the experience. It’s what happens when you go to a bar. Meaning, if you cannot endure second hand smoke, then don’t go to a bar that allows smoking. Seeing as how it does not create an unhealthy work environment and poses no risks to anybody, there is no reason why it should be turned into a statute. Everything about it is bizarre and absusive, why people think they can tell others how to act, when it does no harm them, is something I will never understand.

Were these laws voted on by the public or were they just enacted by the leaders? Quite a bit of difference.

In respect to Constitutional authority, it isn’t relevant.

The legislation was prompted in Ohio by lobbyist groups with backing from corporate entities. Then there was the two years loaded with preferential advertising.

The fact that a business owner in Ohio cannot, under the law, operate their business in the manner that they choose, is unConstitutional. If a business owner chooses to run a business that accepts smoking within, then it is their irrefutable right to do so. If an individual doesn’t like smoking or finds smokers reprehensible, then they can jolly fucking well take their twisted moralities to an establishment that promotes socialist tyranny.

The fact that Ohioans voted this tyrannical proposition into law, is expected. The genetic pool in Ohio has, repeatedly, proven to be substandard and defective ~ you’ll be hard pressed to find more bloody idiotic moralists without a clue confined to a single defined location.

I still vote Ohio as the next sight of future military nuclear testing ~ it could serve no other positive end, other than as a toxic waste dump. Not withstanding I despise these cretins because I have never seen more individuals in one state with convenient religious morality ~ i.e. they are all religiously moral when it suits their agenda, then go back to the alcoholism, drug addiction, pedophilia and spousal/child abuse as soon as they have made themselves look like “good religious folk”.

I used to get sick from the smoke in bars and restaurants. Now I don’t. That’s good enough evidence for me. Salud!

Then you could have always gone to a restaurant where smoking was not allowed.

The fact that it was passed into law, unConstitutionally, shows the socialist tyranny that this country is falling into.