Or, “Glad to hear, sad to hear”.
I’m glad to hear the surgeon general come out with this announcement attacking smoking and especially second hand smoke, saying it is involuntary smoking and it harms and even kills non-smokers. I love that he said non-smoking sections don’t help, only completely banning smoking helps. Now, you can argue the libertarian point of view that we need to allow the economy and people’s demands to self-regulate the need for smokeless public places like restaraunts. But this is the reason why that does not work; as a smoker you are harming me in public locations I have every right to be in. Sometimes it is best when government steps in and doesn’t allow harmful behavior to occur. When smoking goes completely out of style in this country it will be for the best of everyone.
New report attacks all passive smoking - Yahoo! News
Now, I’m sad to hear that we’re banning another kind of smoke. Yes, the Senate in their election year grandstanding are working on an anti-flag burning amendment. I’ve had to think on this one, so perhaps it is worth debate. Though we all know that word has no meaning in Washington. Debate means I grandstand and try to force a vote agreeing with my or my financial supporter’s beliefs, and you do the same, both of us ignoring the other. You have to wonder how many times an elected federal official enters a hearing or debate with an open mind and actually changes it by hearing good arguments? Ah, but I digress.
Yes, what a flag burner is doing is un-American and offensive to our culture, history, society and government. And at one time I thought, well, if they don’t want what the U.S. has to offer them, then why should they be protected to do this?
But the simple fact is this is protest. Freedom of speech. It harms no one. We can’t go down the path of banning activities that offend those who witness them. Yes, the exception is obscenity in public, but you can’t argue this is obscene. Does it offend you? Perhaps. But so does Fred Phelps when he says mean, hateful things on posters at his protests. It’s one thing when he does it at funerals (I haven’t completely decided how I feel about yet another law to ban those protests, though they’re only banned at military funerals and I feel it should be all or nothing), but when he’s in a public space protesting, no matter how putrid I find his words and thoughts, he has a right to express them in public.
So if we ban flag burning, what else do we ban? Pictures of flag burning? What about burning pictures of national monuments or heroes? What about talking about doing it? Why don’t we ban speech that indicates a distaste or dislike for the U.S. It certainly demoralizes our troops overseas to hear such talk on the news and we can’t have that hurting our precious war on terror.
If this passes, we’re headed in a very dangerous direction on a slippery slope taking away our freedom of speech.
I sometimes see myself as being tolerant of all except those who are intolerant, and I question if I’m as bad as them. But it’s an issue like this that reminds me I am not. I will gladly stand beside and defend the rights of people I dislike, am disappointed by and am disgusted by their actions such as Phelps and flag burners. I fervently wish they wouldn’t do it (well, I’ll be honest, I’m not that patriotic, I don’t care THAT much about the flag burning, but I do care about the virulently anti-gay protests), but they have every right to do so. Our society must stop this path of intolerance of those whose views and actions don’t gel with our own world view and embrace the diversity of thought and expression upon which our country and society are based.