If you’ve ever wondered what goes on in the mendacious little minds of anti-smoking activists, you’re in luck. Philip Dawdy, who penned the excellent Seattle Weekly piece on that city’s emerging Nanny State, sends along a jaw-dropping email exchange that took place after Bill Godshall of Smokefree.net sent a nasty reply to his article.

Godshall wrote:

Your op/ed failed to mention lots of other freedom hating laws that infringe upon people’s self perceived rights to urinate, defacate, spit, fornicate, assault others, shot guns, blow up bombs, etc. in public.

Just as you think it should be a right to force carcinogenic tobacco smoke into other people’s lungs, other people also think its their right to force a part of their body into another part of someone else’s body. But rape was also outlawed.

The alternative to your so-called nanny state is anarchy.

Welcome to civilized society.

Dawdy replied:

Ok Bill. Do you now have peer-reviewed data on secondhand exposure in front of coffeehouses? Can you prove to me that it is equivalent to rape??

Or do you guys just get to presume about everything you don’t like in modern society now, because you ‘know?’

Hey, and don’t be shy–my phone number is easy to find.

To which our friend Bill, who obviously missed Dawdy’s point, replied:

I’m not aware of any peer reviewed data on rapes that occur in front of coffeehouses. But that’s not a valid reason to repeal the prohibition of rape in front of coffeehouses.

Forcing anything (especially something that increases risks for cancer, heart disease, asthma and other illnesses) into someone else’s body without the consent of the affected person is not just disrespectful and uncivilized, its grounds for charges of assault or attempted murder. You should be pleased that public health advocates have proposed more lenient charges for those who force cigarette smoke into other people’s lungs.

Former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes got it right when he said, “Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.”

The Holmes quote is popular with the anti-smoking crowd. But it’s not quite accurate. The Ban the Ban folks always responded to it by saying that given that patronizing smoking bars is strictly voluntary, the proper analogy would be for you to run full speed into my closed fist, then complain when you walk away with a bloody nose.

Frankly, even that is probably giving them too much credit. Given the science on secondhand smoke, you’d have to run into my fist several dozen times per day for about 30 years before you’d even begin to see the first signs of a bloody nose. But of course, as soon as one person out of several thousand did get a bloody nose, you’d start agitating for laws calling for the arrest and imprisonment of people who stand around with close fists, lest some anti-smoking activist accidentally bump into one.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2006 at 6:29 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Nanny State, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.