Freedom's New War
By Andrew Roman
Posted On November 26, 2006
Today’s leftists – and some on the right – have decided that health is a moral issue. It has become a value, a religion, as important and ethically relevant as any other value Americans hold sacred. This morality is manifesting itself through a combination of marginally coherent (and agenda-driven) feel-good science and the propensity of today’s liberal to emote as a process of creating policy. Clearly more critical than the ongoing war against Islamo-fascism is America’s REAL battle, the next true threat. While the word “victory” seems to have been vanquished from any discussion relating to the war in Iraq, it is the unabashed battle cry in the Left’s fight to preserve this new value system. It is a struggle for the good of us all. The enemy is: tobacco, and to the moral crusaders, it is our liberty and freedoms that enable this diabolical adversary to continue to kill innocent Americans.
The town of Belmont, California – just a short Volvo ride southeast of San Francisco – has decided to do something about it by breaking out its legislative RAID. Belmont may very well be the first community in America to ban smoking outright in ALL places except single-family detached homes. In a unanimous vote, the Belmont City Council - let’s call it “Mommy” for this discussion - has decided that smoking should not only be expelled from public view but must be abolished privately as well. Mommy will now pursue the strictest smoking legislation in the country. If she gets her way – and assuming you do NOT own a single family detached home - you will not be allowed to smoke in Belmont, California – not even in your own car.
Councilman Dave Warden summed it all up for the members of the council when he asked, “What if every city did this, image how many lives would be saved?”
To quote the Guiness commercials: Brilliant!
That’s the kind of vision that communes and sit-ins are made of – not to mention totalitarian societies. It is also another example of the unmitigated arrogance of today’s leftist. They have taken it upon themselves to regulate and legislate our lives so that, presumably, we won’t ever die. This is all okay, of course, because smoking is a filthy, disgusting habit that kills trillions each month. The fact that Mommy cares enough to imperil your personal freedoms should speak to the moral imperative.
It’s ironic how these very same people whine about provisions of the Patriot Act being a direct threat to our personal liberties while justifying the government’s right to annex a person’s freedom to engage in a completely legal activity under the phony guise of saving lives – even though there is not a single human being who has ever been documented to have died from second hand smoke.
Not one.
Today’s purveyors of the new morality know better than you, and they’ll tell you so.
Dennis Prager makes the point that if second-hand smoke kills as many people as is claimed by these totalitarian like-zealots – (some say as many as 50,000 a year, which would translate to nearly six people an hour dying in this country as a result of coming into contact with second-hand smoke) – then not only should the practice be banned outright everywhere, but those who are smoking need to be arrested and ultimately convicted for taking the lives of the innocent. Logical, yes? If second-hand smoke poses that kind of cataclysmic threat to everyone everywhere, why then are single-family homeowners immune in Belmont? Don’t they matter? Aren’t the potential “innocents” in that single-family home as much at risk as someone who lives three floors above a smoker in an apartment building?
It is all sheer nonsense.
And if this proposal should pass precisely as Mommy wants it, should we then expect the ACLU to step up and defend personal liberty? Perhaps a better question is whether or not anyone truly believe that once the evil of smoking is wiped clean from the collective lives of the people in Belmont, it will simply end there.
The zealotry from the left when it comes to this issue is remarkable. The anti-smoking crowd is among the most – if not THE most – intolerant in our society, and they continue to push falsehoods to further their agenda. Despite inconclusive evidence, rigged statistics and studies that show that the catastrophic dangers of second-hand smoke are bogus (note the recent report by the British Medical Journal as one example), these people are more than willing to sacrifice your liberties for you. It is truly ironic how leftists aim to protect the physical body from selected poisons while scoffing at any suggestion that poisons of the mind and soul (hyper-sexed music videos, profanity-laced pop music, the banishing of God from schools, etc) have any kind of impact on people.
Morality, indeed.
Once the scourge of tobacco is eradicated and people stop dropping like Warner Brothers’ cartoon anvils from second-hand smoke, then we could turn our attentions to more casual fancies – like Islamo-facism.
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