2005?
It’s really difficult to believe, isn’t it? …That we can have some tribunal of imbeciles perched behind marble pillars, wearing black robes, sitting high atop carved wooden benches dictating what 270 million people can and can’t smoke on their own time and at their own expense.
John Lopez has it right on. You should be ashamed. You who support such nanny-statism by going to the polls to have your 1/270,000,000th say in how yours and everyone else’s life should be directed from on high. Assholes.
This sure isn’t anything anywhere near the vision of the future that was inspired in me as a kid in the 60s, seeing films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and others. Not by a long shot.
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Andrew:
Jeff cals it right, and, my assessment was not intended to favor one party over another. They're all guilty. I understand the Republicans "talk" limited government, sometimes, but they rarely practice it, anymore.
We now live in a culture in which minding one's own business is becoming strictly anathema. Just about everybody believes that they have a legitimate interest in anything and everything that anyone else does in the peaceful conduct of their private affairs. This is, of course, profoundly non- and anti-American.
Remember the old New Left saw: "The personal is political"?
We now approach its fulfillment far more broadly and deeply than anyone in the 60's had the nerve to hope.
I think he's diagnosed the problem pretty much correctly. There are people on both ends of the political spectrum who are afraid that someone, somewhere might be having fun, and it is their solemn duty to make sure it stops. Witness the PETA protests equating eating meat to cannibalism, the whole "War of Drugs" fiasco, The Center for Science in the Public Interest and their campaign to give every food rating an "Artery clogging Big Mac" score.
For every activity you and I enjoy, there is a group who is passionate about stamping it out. And the easiest way to get that done is to pass a law and make the state make us do it, because, as a general rule, we're too stupid to know what's good for us.
Three of the Justices in the majority were Republican appointees, and three Democrats. Nanny statism is hardly the issue here. Of the appointees since Bush 41, only Thomas voted with the minority. That is because since Reagan left office, Presidents of both parties have consistently pushed judges who, whatever their ideology might be otherwise, are prepared to grant ever-greater power to the federal government, at the expense of state rights and individual liberty. I am no more sympathetic to the Court's ruling than you, but it seems to me you diagnose the problem wrongly.