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Week of 04 20 03

Let us discuss a controversial topic that I've written of before: the smoking ban (1, 2).

Some of you misunderstood my position. The smoking ban is certainly convenient; it is nice to leave a bar or club and not smell of smoke. But the point of my invective was that whether smoking is allowed or not should be up to business owners. The anti-smoking lobby should have pointed their efforts in that direction. When the government makes up lies about false "cancer-causing" effects of second hand smoke in order to pass laws governing the private behavior of consenting adults on private property, it sets a dangerous precedent, it is wrong, and it is fascist. 

Furthermore, the smoking ban, unlike any other law, is written so that property owners are punished when people on their property break the law. This unfairly forces property owners to enforce the law, putting the lives of property owners and their employees, all private citizens, at risk.

Evidence? Just last week, a group of agitated smokers at Guernica murdered a bouncer who had asked them to smoke outside.

The argument that the job of a bouncer is dangerous anyway because they're there to stop fights and eject rowdy patrons, smoking or not, is irrelevant. For one thing, it is always in a bar's interest to eject rowdy patrons; after all, they could potentially harm other customers or damage property. A cigarette smoker does neither of those things. Secondly, if a bar fight gets too severe a bar can call the police to intervene. A bar cannot call the police to simply eject a smoker because then the bar itself could get punished! (As if the police don't have better things to do anyway in post 9/11 New York than eject smokers from bars and clubs.)

The job of a bouncer is dangerous enough. Does it need to be made even more dangerous? Enforcing law is the job of the police. When private citizens with no real authority have to do it, trouble follows.

As the NY Times reported:

" 'Of course the smoking ban has the potential for violence,' said Blake Webster, a manager at Tortilla Flats, a Mexican restaurant at Washington and West 12th Streets in the West Village. 'It's another thing you have to tell extremely inebriated people to do.'

More problematic, he added, was babysitting sidewalk smokers outside so that they do not become a neighborhood nuisance."

When someone parks illegally in front of a church, does the church get shut down? Does the church pay a fine? Is it the church's responsibility to have the car towed away? Of course not. So why is it a club's responsibility to eject smokers? Why are bars and clubs punished when people smoke? Why do so many of you support this anti-nightlife nonsense?

 "To put it bluntly, the owner of the property should be able to determine - for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all - whether to admit smokers, nonsmokers, neither, or both. Customers or employees who object may go elsewhere. They would not be relinquishing any right that they ever possessed. By contrast, when a businessman is forced to effect an unwanted smoking policy on his own property, the government violates his rights."
- Robert Levy, the Cato Institute

In my initial smoking ban update, I warned of one of the dangerous precedents the smoking ban - and its punishment of property owners - would set:

"If someone does E in my apartment without me knowing and OD’s, do I then become culpable? Is this on the horizon?"

I had no idea that this would happen so soon, but it has. The newly passed Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act (colloquially known as the "Rave Act") makes it so.

If someone does drugs without you knowing at a gathering in your apartment, the Rave Act makes you responsible for it. Even if you frisk everyone entering your apartment and post up big signs asking people not to use drugs in your home, it doesn't matter. If someone takes drugs and ODs in your bathroom, the Rave Act makes you responsible for their death. Even if someone is caught toking off their own joint in your home you could face up to 20 years in prison and $500,000 in fines.

The Rave Act also makes it a crime to house medical marijuana users, thereby putting landlords in danger if any of their tenants are AIDS or cancer patients who use marijuana to ease their suffering.

The government can't even keep drugs out of prisons, and yet clubowners, party promoters, landlords and now even you are responsible for making sure that no one on your premises has or uses any drugs.

In my original smoking ban update I also made the connection between the smoking ban and sodomy laws in reference to the private property issue:

"Gay sex is illegal in Texas, even on private property. This is not a dormant law. In 1998 two men were arrested in Texas for doing just that...
It is all connected. You're either for personal liberty or you're not.."

Many saw that connection as a stretch. But is it? The Supreme Court just heard that case and here are the scariest moments from the hearing:

Paul Smith, lawyer for the defendants: "It's conceded by the state of Texas that married couples cannot be regulated in their private sexual decisions..."

Justice Antonin Scalia: "They may have conceded it. But I haven't."

In another exchange, District Attorney Charles A. Rosenthal Jr. said that Texas “has a right to set moral standards.. for its people.”

Justice Stephen G. Breyer responded with: "Could they say, for example, it is against the law at the dinner table to tell really serious lies to your family?"

District Attorney Rosenthal: "Yes, they can make that a law."

This, in the United States Supreme Court. It's an outrage.

These issues are connected. Smoking bans set the legal precedent that helped lead to the Rave Act's passage in two ways. First, by giving the government control over private consensual behavior on private property, and next by giving the government the power to punish property owners for transgressions committed by persons other than themselves on their property.

Smoking bans also sent the message to conservative lawmakers that nightlife denizens were generally so ignorant and apolitical that virtually anything could be slipped by them.

Finally, both the smoking ban and the Rave Act lend credence to those defending sodomy law, i.e. government's "right" to regulate private (in this case, sexual) behavior on, you guessed it, private property.

"The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire."
- Senator Rick Santorum, frightening the hell out of anyone who believes in freedom.

These laws are about the government telling us what to do, how to behave ourselves and how to have fun, even when we are not harming anyone in the privacy of our own homes.

Those of you who support the smoking ban tacitly lend support to even more dangerous laws. If you don't see this then you must also dispute that 1+1=2.

Let me rephrase something Benjamin Franklin once said: Those who sacrifice freedom for convenience deserve neither.

"A power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will. Property must be sacred or liberty cannot exist."
- Alexander Hamilton

"Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected, [and therefore] no man is safe in his opinions."
- James Madison

"No other rights are safe where property is not safe." 
- John Adams

I am not real. My skin is silicone and the eyes, pure plastic. Hair of wire and a body of foam; a paper snowflake where my heart would be. My consciousness exists only to explain acts that I have already taken.

What of you? Where is the free will you claim to have? Have you given it away?

If I shout at a wall, does it bend? Are you just as inanimate? If I grow old and die screaming in an empty room, will anything have changed?

Let me put it simply: if you value your freedom to go clubbing, and yet still support the smoking ban, then you're a shortsighted, stupid fool.

'Prohibition Groove' by Prohibition

If I were Southern, I'd be ornery. If I were old, I'd be a curmudgeon. But as it stands now, I am simply a bitch.

Better that than stupid.

until next week, remember..
when you dance, we are a part of what you feel.