Yay! Susanna Cornett is back, though her comments don't seem to be functioning at the moment. So I'll post one here.
Susanna has some interesting things to say about a local smoking ban in Lexington, KY. And she points to some of the blatant inconsistencies in the positions of both the left and the right when it comes to protecting individual freedom. Liberals, she says, are usually the ones trying to ban smoking (really?), but in this case, they're also the ones invoking local jurisdiction, generally considered a right-wing shelter.
So now we have conservatives trying to pull state rank to protect individual rights, while the liberals are crying "local issue! local issue!" so they can choke individual freedoms.
As usual, Susanna has put her finger on an interesting dichotomy. But here's my question. Since when is the individual freedom to breathe considered less worthy of protection than the individual right to smoke?
Yeah, I'm out of the closet on this one, folks. A more rabid anti-smoker you will not find in the blogosphere. That's a promise. But many of the people I know personally who agree with me on this issue are die-hard conservatives with whom I can't even discuss abortion or gay rights. Go figure.
