God and Tobacco

[halloweenjack]

From a Decatur (Illinois) Herald & Review story on local hospitals banning smoking on their premises, starting July 4:

Taylor said she feels it would be inconceivable to ban smoking in a person's car.

"When you've got somebody in (the hospital), you need a break for a cigarette," she said. "I'll smoke in my car if I (want to). Only 14 percent of people are against God, but the 86 percent of people who believe in him are getting their rights taken away in public areas. Now it's working its way down to cigarettes. Next, they're going to tell us we can't smoke in our own homes."

When they said that it was inappropriate for the Ten Commandments to be posted in courtrooms, I didn't say anything because I wasn't a fundamentalist looney. When they said that it was inappropriate for someone to fire up a cancer stick at Marlboro Man Memorial while Uncle Clem was having most of his emphysematic lungs taken out, I didn't say anything...

Comments

[bleakdesolation.livejournal.com]

Dunno how the God thing is relevant. But your own car is your own property, and it does in fact have its own separate air filtration unit (your air conditioner) so it should be perfectly fine to smoke in there. Plus, do you want nicotine deprived hosp employees getting all shaky and spastic and trying to insert an IV into your arm? Shit, I don't! The folks who are making these rules aren't thinking.

[jackolantern.livejournal.com]

I think that she's trying to draw a comparison between the supposed "banning" of religious symbols and observations in public (really just a few people working against official government endorsement of religion, but whipped up by fundamentalists, and the politicians that they support, into a fictional national crisis), and similar banning of smoking in public places. Conservatives are often quite successful at putting godless secular humanists and health Nazis under the same liberal umbrella.

I think that the hospitals are banning smoking both for the reasons that Mari cites above, and also because they're trying to limit their health insurance liability both now and in the future. One thing that the article mentions is that hospital employees can buy nicotine patches at wholesale prices. I know that smoking serves other functions for people--such as giving an excuse to get the hell away from annoying coworkers and managers for a few minutes--but at least they wouldn't be jonesing.

[bleakdesolation.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I guess you could make do with a patch. Though when Keith tried them, he got nauseated.