Laws prohibiting smoking in a privately-owned bar is not like laws against drunk drivers. It's like demanding the right to stand out in the middle of a freeway and then prohibiting people from driving on it.

If a private barowner wants to make his bar nonsmoking, he can. If he wants to allow smoking, he should be able to. If the dumbass waitresses who thought they could get a job in a smoking bar without being exposed to smoke have a complaint, they can go to work somewhere else. The antismoking Psycho Hose Beasts here in California are now working on making smoking outdoors illegal.

I don't know exactly when the idea became valid that because a privately-owned business is open to the general public, that this business suddenly becomes the property of the state, and subject to its complete control, but this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

There is currently no aspect of your life that I can think of that the government cannot now legitimately justify controlling. This is all amusing and satisfying to nonsmokers, I'm sure. Until the Lidless Eye turns on them...

A little historical perspective:

...Although the Nazis were hardly the first or the only group to counsel preventive measures, their conception of the German Volkskörper, or people’s body, and their obsession with its long-term health, made them particularly eager to manage public health even if it meant making unprecedented public excursions into private spheres.



...The war on cancer also fit well with the Nazi notion that national health “could be restored by avoiding exposure to rare but powerful agents corroding the German Volkskörper.” The Nazis regarded Jews and the cancer to which they were often and perniciously compared as dangerous but basically exogenous perils that could be managed and even eradicated if there was sufficient political will. The Weimar Republic was a monstrous historical failure in the fascist perspective precisely because its fractured democratic system could not mobilize the political authority to combat the mortal threats facing Germany in the 20th century. Like so many other perils that the Nazis identified, cancer appeared to be “a political disease, requiring political solutions.”

The focus on cancer gives Proctor a broad view of the body politics at the heart of Nazism. The battle metaphors and cleansing, detoxifying aims of the war on cancer, of course, complemented the single-minded effort to rid Germany of Jews and finally to get rid of the Jews altogether. They also corresponded to elaborate policies to sterilize Germans with purported genetic disabilities. But purification also meant improving the lifestyle of productive non-Jewish Germans.

The Nazis waged prominent campaigns against alcohol and smoking and urged Germans to eat more whole-grain bread and foods high in vitamins and fiber. Nonetheless, as Proctor insightfully points out, what at first glance looked like a familiar campaign to educate the public was in fact the mobilization of private bodies to public ends. “Enlightenment in the Nazi era was not something you yourself strived to attain,” Proctor writes, “but rather something you did to other people or other people did to you.”

...“The Nazi campaign against tobacco and the `whole-grain bread operation,’” Proctor concludes, “are, in some sense, as fascist as the yellow stars and the death camps.” They highlight the degree to which the Nazis sought to create a “secure and sanitary utopia” and as a result enjoyed broad support. By making this compelling argument, Proctor demonstrates that fascism was a much more subtle and seductive phenomenon than we commonly imagine.