BCT Editorial – 6/6/08

This page was last updated on June 14, 2008.

Starting point; Editorial; Beaver County Times; June 6, 2008.

The editorial subtitle is “Legislation on indoor-smoking ban is far from ideal, but that’s no reason to reject it.”

This is at least the 38^th anti-smoking on private property editorial since March 2005, and the 13^th in the last five months. There have been so many the Times is recycling editorial titles. The previous 37 editorials were “Momentum,” “Banned in Beaver,” “Get used to it,” “Trendy #1,” “Trendy #2,” “Straggling behind,” “Salutes & Boots,” “Smoked out #1,” “Smoked out #2,” “Smoked out #3,” “Smoke free,” “Survey says smoking ban popular,” “Inertia,” “Doing harm,” “Smokey state,” “Quit stalling,” “Snuffed out,” “Cleaning the air,” “Keeping up,” “Smoking ban,” “Life and death,” “Poor excuses,” “Banned,” “Smoky City,” “No more delays,” “Haunting fear,” “Sad state,” “Fear factor,” “Pay up,” “Banned in Bristol,” “Escape artists,” “Lapped,” “The right thing,” “No joke,” “Different drummer” and “Classic politics,” and “No joke.” Though, for a change, the Times did not resort to name-calling in this editorial, it did fall back on the tried and true “but they did it” argument many of us used as kids.

Maybe it’s just me, but if I were writing an editorial to convince readers to agree with my position, I wouldn’t use “Trendy” as the title. To me, it conveys messages of smoke (no pun intended) blowing in the wind and/or being a slave to fashionable positions.

Though “Snuffed out” conceded the Times is calling for a smoking ban in private spaces (bars, clubs, restaurants, etc.), the Times reverted to form in “Cleaning the air” and is back to referring to private property as “public spaces.”

I wish someone would explain the real reason behind the crusade against smoking on private property. As I’ve detailed in previous critiques, the reasons cited by the aforementioned editorials don’t hold up under scrutiny. Could it be “the camel’s nose under the tent” strategy to open the door to other nanny government directives? What’s the next “unhealthy behavior” the Times will want to ban? See my critique of “Food fight” to see what I mean. As we already know, the Times is all for laws to ban behavior it simply believes is annoying. When will the Times find a study that asserts getting information from anywhere other than a local newspaper is unhealthy? <g>

Normally I’d conclude with something like “as can be expected after 38+ editorials, there’s nothing new of significance in this editorial.” That’s pretty much true, but I found this little tidbit revealing: “A so-so law banning indoor smoking is better than no law at all.” In this leadoff sentence we have the core of leftist ideology. As long as a law restricts freedom, it’s better than nothing and only a “starting point.”