The wimps have won: Smoking ban ignores liberties

Smoking is disgusting.
It causes lung cancer, emphysema and bad breath, among other things.
It’s beaten into our brains daily how awful it is. I pay attention to all of it because, I confess, I am a smoker, and have been since I was a teenager. Those who smoke are made to feel like we’re second class citizens. Now, we’ll be huddled outside in the cold, unless we want to face a fine. In our current milieu, being a smoker is comparable to being a leper or a criminal.
Well, we’ll literally be a criminal come May 1.
Now that the state legislature banned smoking from basically everywhere besides our homes (are those next?), it will be a prosecutable criminal act if, say, you light up in a bar. Granholm will surely sign it into law soon.
Could you imagine the Founding Fathers coming up with such nonsense? Wasn’t our nation founded on liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everyone? A business owner’s private property should not be subject to government interference.
The claim is that no one should have to work in a place where their health is threatened from something like second-hand smoke. So, if that’s the case, do we start banning nails and saws from construction sites or knives from restaurant kitchens? Those are more immediately dangerous, right? Whether second-hand smoke is even a threat has dubious science behind it.
I’m not surprised the nanny culture got this victory and the wimps have won, though. There are smoking bans all over the country now, in 32 states, and Michigan is just following the pack so they don’t look behind the times.
It’s kind of like Prohibition all over again. Temperance organizations pushed the government much like the anti-smoking people to ban booze. We saw how that all turned out. While the second-hand smoke argument is a bit more cogent, it still goes against everything this county was founded on.
It’s a moral judgment, backed by the health police. Will it soon be a law to brush your teeth three times a day, eat your vegetables and go jogging?
No one should be able to tell you what to do in this way. If non-smokers don’t want to smell smoke, then don’t go to a bar. It’s that simple.
I’ve seen all this before. I was living in Chicago when they passed their smoking ban. But it will affect Manistee differently. Bars and restaurants in a big city like Chicago have a lot of different people filtering through them. They don’t rely on “regulars” to keep their businesses afloat like establishments in places like Manistee do.
Our economy in Michigan is bad enough. We don’t need one more barrier to do business.
So, come May 1, I suppose I’ll have to stand outside with the rest of the smokers while non-smokers enjoy their pristine air inside.
But we smokers will stay strong, even though the un-American wimps have won.