Beginning on January 1, 2008, all indoor workplaces and public places, including bars/taverns, restaurants, private clubs, and casinos, will be smoke-free. Smoking will also be prohibited within 15 feet of all entrances and exits, windows that open and ventilation intakes. The new law ensures that all Illinois workers will have a workplace safe from secondhand smoke, and that all of us can breathe clean, smoke-free air when we eat out or spend a night on the town…the Smoke Free Illinois Act prohibits smoking in all indoor workplaces and public places including bars/taverns, restaurants, private clubs, and casinos.
No, Illinois is hardly Paradise. No matter how you slice it, it’s still Illinois…and it still isn’t a place I’d care to call home. Hey, before you begin getting on my case, I was born in Chicago, ‘kay? I know of which I speak. As of January 1st, though, Illinois sucks just a wee bit less, because smoking in all indoor workplaces and public places has largely been outlawed. Another triumph for the lungs of those who refuse to have to inhale second-hand smoke…and one more battle victoriously concluded in the war against tobacco. Even France has banned smoking in bars and restaurants effective January 1st. Cafe culture may never be the same, but even the French government recognizes the health hazards posed by second-hand smoke. Now if Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe follow suit, life would be pretty good, no?
Of course, I’ll grant you that the logical question is how far down this road is too far? I believe that government absolutely has a role in promoting public health, but there’s a point where too much of a good thing is exactly that. I’m not certain I have the answer to that question, but I’m ecstatic with each victorious skirmish in the war against smoking. I’ve said it before (and some of y’all have hammered me for it), and I’ll say it again- your right to smoke ends when it impacts my right to breathe clean, untobaccofied air. If you choose to slowly commit suicide, that’s one thing, but I refuse to be an unwilling participant and be adversely impacted by your carcinogenic addiction.
It will be a beautiful day when smoking is taxed to the point of being prohibitively expensive AND there are no longer easy or convenient venues available for smokers to feed their addiction. I realize that may sound harsh, but after growing up with a father who smoked, and after having worked in the former Yugoslavia, where smoking is the national sport, I DETEST cigarettes. Yes, perhaps it’s not rational, but I no longer really care about being rational. It’s about the right to breathe clean air. Period. Any questions?
How 'bout that... Jack agrees with Mike Huckabee!
"Huckabee committed to sign a nationwide smoking ban in public places, should such a measure win approval in Congress."
Oh, man...talk about the law of unintended consequences.... :O)
I agree wholeheartedly with every statement you make. One sickening word comes to mind however... Lobbyists! Yecch...
I agree that my right to smoke ends when it impacts your right to breathe clean, untobaccofied air. (You must hate automobiles, fireplaces, and etc. as well, but that is besides the point). Given that I accept your right, does this mean you have the right to impose your view upon every bar in the world? Why can't can't there be that good old American thing known as a choice? If both kinds of bars existed, you would have a choice, and smokers would have a choice. Unfortunately, your solutuion is the fascist one, the coercive government one. You don't mind this governmental decision because you hate smoking. You are admutting it is really all about you. But this is a slippery slope you are sending us down.
I don't like loud music in bars and restaurants. I hate it, in fact, though I love music and listen to lots of different types of music all the time. In my opinion, your right to listen to loud music in bars and nightclubs ends when it impacts my right to hear my companions and not suffer irrepable hearing loss. However, I am not self-important to think that there should be a ban on music in bars. I do, after all, have a choice as to what bar I can patronize, and do so. This is the non-fascist view of the issue.
I agree that my right to smoke ends when it impacts your right to breathe clean, untobaccofied air. (You must hate automobiles, fireplaces, and etc. as well, but that is besides the point). Given that I accept your right, does this mean you have the right to impose your view upon every bar in the world? Why can't can't there be that good old American thing known as a choice? If both kinds of bars existed, you would have a choice, and smokers would have a choice. Unfortunately, your solutuion is the fascist one, the coercive government one. You don't mind this governmental decision because you hate smoking. You are admutting it is really all about you. But this is a slippery slope you are sending us down.
I don't like loud music in bars and restaurants. I hate it, in fact, though I love music and listen to lots of different types of music all the time. In my opinion, your right to listen to loud music in bars and nightclubs ends when it impacts my right to hear my companions and not suffer irrepable hearing loss. However, I am not self-important to think that there should be a ban on music in bars. I do, after all, have a choice as to what bar I can patronize, and do so. This is the non-fascist view of the issue.
I agree that my right to smoke ends when it impacts your right to breathe clean, untobaccofied air. (You must hate automobiles, fireplaces, and etc. as well, but that is besides the point). Given that I accept your right, does this mean you have the right to impose your view upon every bar in the world? Why can't can't there be that good old American thing known as a choice? If both kinds of bars existed, you would have a choice, and smokers would have a choice. Unfortunately, your solutuion is the fascist one, the coercive government one. You don't mind this governmental decision because you hate smoking. You are admutting it is really all about you. But this is a slippery slope you are sending us down.
I don't like loud music in bars and restaurants. I hate it, in fact, though I love music and listen to lots of different types of music all the time. In my opinion, your right to listen to loud music in bars and nightclubs ends when it impacts my right to hear my companions and not suffer irrepable hearing loss. However, I am not self-important to think that there should be a ban on music in bars. I do, after all, have a choice as to what bar I can patronize, and do so. This is the non-fascist view of the issue.
Sorry that posted three times.
From yesterday's NYT, Stephen Pinker -"Much of our recent social history, including the culture wars between liberals and conservatives, consists of the moralization or amoralization of particular kinds of behavior. Even when people agree that an outcome is desirable, they may disagree on whether it should be treated as a matter of preference and prudence or as a matter of sin and virtue. Rozin notes, for example, that smoking has lately been moralized. Until recently, it was understood that some people didn’t enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as immoral. Smokers are ostracized; images of people smoking are censored; and entities touched by smoke are felt to be contaminated (so hotels have not only nonsmoking rooms but nonsmoking floors). The desire for retribution has been visited on tobacco companies, who have been slapped with staggering “punitive damages.”
At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices. They include divorce, illegitimacy, being a working mother, marijuana use and homosexuality. Many afflictions have been reassigned from payback for bad choices to unlucky misfortunes. There used to be people called “bums” and “tramps”; today they are “homeless.” Drug addiction is a “disease”; syphilis was rebranded from the price of wanton behavior to a “sexually transmitted disease” and more recently a “sexually transmitted infection.”
This wave of amoralization has led the cultural right to lament that morality itself is under assault, as we see in the group that anointed itself the Moral Majority. In fact there seems to be a Law of Conservation of Moralization, so that as old behaviors are taken out of the moralized column, new ones are added to it. Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer. Food alone has become a minefield, with critics sermonizing about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the distance the food has traveled from farm to plate.
Many of these moralizations, like the assault on smoking, may be understood as practical tactics to reduce some recently identified harm. But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.