Posted by Gremlin [12.211.217.120 - ] on 09 November 2002 at 05.53.36 ZuluTime:

In Reply to: Florida's smoking ban is unconstitutional! posted by American Constitutional Research Service on 09 November 2002 at 04.13.57 ZuluTime:

The sad fact of the matter is that most laws are unconstitutional. But laws against smoking are the most obvious.
     The essential concept of this country is that everyone [both within and without, incidentally] has an unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's important to keep in mind here.
     It could almost be argued that a nonsmoker has an unalienable right to live autonomously from smoke. But that logic fails on most levels. Not the least of which is that smoke is a naturally occuring object, and one's unalienable right to avoid it is tantamount to one's unalienable right to avoid oxygen.
     That aside, the first rational question to be asked is 'why don't the antismokers just avoid the restaurants with smoking sections?' McDonald's, for example, never needed a law against smoking in restaurants to disallow it; there are places all over the world which, as a matter of policy, disallow cigarettes.
     The answer, of course, is that they already do that. The antismokers began by boycotting restaurants which allowed smoking. But no one noticed because the antismokers comprise about a tenth of one percent of the nation while the smokers represent about twenty-five percent. Whether the antismokers also weren't missed because they're the same morons who bitch and moan about everything else in the universe is an ad hominem beyond the scope of the issue.
     The simple reality here is that the antismokers already avoided the smokers by boycotting the restaurants which still accomodated them. When it turned out that no one really cared whether they boycotted these places, they went a step further and started working on a law to abolish the rights--the unalienable rights--of restaurant owners to allow or disallow smoking within their private property by their own free will.
     So, yes: the ban is very much unconstitutional.
     I could post a couple of predictions here on the effects this will have--including the mass exodus of half the privately-held businesses in Florida; but Hunter is currently compiling gigabytes of information for colorado.forces.org anyway, so I'll leave it to her to post a few numbers and anecdotes regarding the whole issue.