Chicago anti-smokers, have you heard of this thing called Freedom?

Unless you live around Chicago you’re probably not familiar with what’s currently going on here. Well, some people are lobbying to make Chicago smoke-free. What this means is they want to outlaw smoking in ALL restaurants and ALL bars.

I’m not a cigarette smoker, and while I do smoke an occasional cigar, this legislation really doesn’t affect me. In fact, I hate inhaling smoke while I’m eating. Even when I DID smoke cigarettes, I never did it with a meal, it just ruined the meal for me. So, I tend to gravitate to smoke-free restaurants anyway.

This whole movement still pisses me off.

Why? Because it comes down to simple freedom. It’s just another step in a long line of freedoms government is taking away. It makes it all that much easier for them to take away something else later.

Here’s what I don’t understand. Why can’t we have smoking restaurants and bars AND non-smoking restaurants and bars? Require that they mark what they are clearly on the outside of the establishment. Then, you can let the market decide. If people REALLY don’t want to go to a smoking establishment, then they don’t have to go. Wow, freedom of CHOICE. What a fucking concept.

I imagine if a smoking establishment sees their clientele drop significantly, then they might make a switch to non-smoking. VOLUNTARILY. No government sticking their damn noses in and requiring adults to conform to another freedom-grab.

My wife even brought up a point that maybe we could require the smoking establishments to get a Smoking license, much like a liquour license. There could be some standards in regards to what type of ventilation they have, and money from those licenses could go to non-smoking programs like TV advertising and things like the American Cancer Society.

Sounds like a good compromise. This would allow me, as a free adult, the CHOICE of which restaurants I wanted to go to. I wouldn’t be forced to go to a smoking establishment, and the smoker likewise would not be forced to a non-smoking restaurant.

But instead we have the whiney bitch-ass non-smokers pushing to take away freedom. Make no mistake, they aren’t simply taking away smoking, they are taking away FREEDOM.

Now one of their arguments is that second-hand smoke really hurts people. They even trot out this waitress girl who got throat cancer despite not being a smoker herself. The doctors say it’s “probably” because of second-hand smoke. It’s not definitive, and I don’t doubt that it’s the case. The message is that second-hand smoke is bad.

No shit? Really? We’ve known that for a really long time, longer than she was a waitress. So, she knowingly worked in that environment, KNOWING that it could harm her health. Freedom of choice once again. She chose to work there despite knowing what could happen. If you boil it down, it’s no different from a contractor in Iraq, or from a construction worker working in heavy machinery, or auto body men in their paint booths. Every once of those people knew that there were risks involved, and yet they do the job anyway.

Am I glad this girl got cancer? Hell no. That being said, it turns my stomach to see her on TV going “If other cities can be smoke-free, why not Chicago?”

Because of freedom.

These people would say they support freedom, but when it comes down to it, they only support the freedoms THEY want. God forbid we try to outlaw their Hummer, they might fight that to the death.

People only want freedom on their terms, and I fucking hate that. We’re not really free, and what freedoms we do have dwindle every single day. Do you really want to support that?

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