Iowa leading the way
originally reported by webquatch
I'm sure the hankies are out, the teeth are being grinded and the hands are bring wrung tonight in Iowa but ultimately the Iowa Supreme Court just lead the way.
Supreme Court of Iowa Opinion on the rights of Homosexuals to Marry (PDF) April 3, 2009
"Our constitution does not permit any branch of government to resolve ( Read more... )
I'm sure the hankies are out, the teeth are being grinded and the hands are bring wrung tonight in Iowa but ultimately the Iowa Supreme Court just lead the way.
Supreme Court of Iowa Opinion on the rights of Homosexuals to Marry (PDF) April 3, 2009
"Our constitution does not permit any branch of government to resolve ( Read more... )
1. Discrimination against smokers (and yes I do believe that smokers are singled out unfairly, as I have discussed before) is NOT the same thing as discrimination against GBLT. Nobody is telling smokers that they can't marry. Nobody is telling smokers that they can't adopt. Nobody is sitting around on talk radio talking about how smokers should all be murdered and that they're not human and have no rights. Nobody is telling smokers that the person they love cannot visit them in the hospital or receive health benefits under their partner's medical plan (though insurance companies admittedly don't like smokers but there are valid reasons for that). Nobody is talking about firing smokers solely because they smoke. The moment somebody beats a smoker to almost to death and leaves them impaled on a fence to die over the course of three or four hours then you can start a pity party. Until then you can take the false moral equivalence elsewhere.
2. I support the right of any American to put whatever they want in their own bodies whether it will kill, maim or vegetablize them in the long run so long as that right doesn't impinge on my rights, my health, or my safety. But the fact is that your addiction directly impacts the health of everyone around you, including yourself. I believe it is an unreasonable imposition against smokers to force you guys outside to smoke, especially in inclement weather. I also think it is unfair treatment to force you guys out of restaurants and bars (especially bars... wtf!) even though as a non-smoker I directly benefit from it. However, there's not one thing that a GBLT person can do that that is going to adversely effect MY health or the health of my child by their mere proximity solely on the merit of their GBLT status.
3. The FACT is that smokers are an incredibly expensive drag on the economy, especially ones without actual health insurance such as yourself. So if you have a problem with taxes on cigarettes, do like my mother does and buy a bag of tobacco, and a box of tubes and the little tobacco pusher thing and make your own damned cigarettes. If I've gotta pay higher taxes and higher medical insurance premiums as a result of the consequences of YOUR freedom to pollute your body then you can damned well contribute.
4. Tobacco lobbyists spend billions of dollars each year. Nobody was spending billions of dollars to aid the GBLT community to secure rights they were already guaranteed by the Constitution.
5. As of yet, nobody is talking about taking away gun rights and guess what you have the ability to own a gun. In fact the SCOTUS recently ruled that the right to bear arms is essential to the American citizen's freedoms when giving DC citizens the right to bear arms. The only thing you are denied is the right to carry it on your person because of your medical history. Which, if you decided to, you could probably fight in court. I've known you for 17 years and you know what? I wouldn't let you carry a gun in public either.
6. And by the way, there were 'parades for your rights', along with Fred and Barney, Bugs Bunny and thousands of Hollywood stars smoking and shilling for cigs for roughly sixty years while the tobacco lobbyists and 'scientists' were busy falsifying evidence that smoking had a direct link to cancer.
7. Your ability to get laid or not is based on your own merit. It has little to nothing to do with your smoking or lack there of. GBLT people have all the same issues and then some as straight people when it comes to getting laid. Some do, some don't and in any case that's irrelevant to them being denied basic freedoms that every other American has enjoyed since the 60's.
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8. Your life, your choice, your liberty, your freedom. In the case of smoking directly effect my life, my choice, my liberty and my freedom. In fact that I can die of lung cancer as a -direct- result of other people's smoking even though I've never taken a puff in my life means that yes, there should be reasonable limits placed on smoking just like there should be limits placed on arsenic and rocket fuel in drinking water. If you are so upset about your life, your choice, your liberty and your freedom I say to you the same thing I say to GBLT people - get off your ass and do something about it.
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"The FACT is that smokers are an incredibly expensive drag on the economy, especially ones without actual health insurance such as yourself. So if you have a problem with taxes on cigarettes, do like my mother does and buy a bag of tobacco, and a box of tubes and the little tobacco pusher thing and make your own damned cigarettes. If I've gotta pay higher taxes and higher medical insurance premiums as a result of the consequences of YOUR freedom to pollute your body then you can damned well contribute."
Yes, my only having visited the doctor three times in the past 5 years is an incredible drag on the economy... and I even paid for the visits myself.
I do buy tobacco by the pound and make my own. That type of tobacco went up in price from $11.99 per pound to $44.99 per pound. That's nearly a fourfold increase in price. That is still the cheapest way to go, as a single pack, of 20 cigarettes, now costs four times the cost of a single gallon of gas. Further taxation only increases the 'drag' on the economy, as more money is taken out of circulation and removed from said economy.
What short-sighted people consistently fail to see if the line isn't drawn somewhere, freedom, as we know it, will cease to exist. So cigarettes are bad for you and supposedly a drag on the economy. I've heard that said about fast food... so what's next? Cholesterol tax? Make 'undesirable' foods so expensive as to be completely unaffordable? Sorry, I like the cheeseburger and fries. It fundamentally breaks down to outright extortion. Freedom you have to buy with money is no freedom at all. A trial-less fine for something unpopular in society.
I am treated differently because I make a decision about how I want to live my life. I have to give up my pursuit of happiness because of someone else's wishes? Sound familiar at all?
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Perhaps you are. But tell me, when's the last time someone shot you for wearing high heels to school as a boy? When's the last time someone beat you for six hours straight and dumped you in a ditch only to die having crawled halfway across a five acre cornfield? When is the last time you were jumped and raped in a gas station by five guys who didn't like the fact that as a woman you had short hair and tattoos who had it coming because she was a lesbian? When was the last time a state decided that you as a smoker weren't allowed to marry? All of those things have happened in just the last few years.
I don't believe in smoking bans in the same way I don't believe in transfat bans or bans on injecting heroine into your scroat for a quick high. My problem with your statement:
I think the most unpopular group of people in the country are smokers...I don't see people throwing parades for our rights. Legislative social marginalization from both sides of the aisle on every level of government... multi-level taxation... Where the hell is my representation? Oh yeah, I see them now... riding the politically-correct persecute-and-tax wave. Can't afford lobbyists for our position anymore... its all going to buying more smokes ;) The price of mine increased 400%. Thank you, fiscal rapists.
Is that you're trying to draw an equivalence between apples and Oldsmobiles here. You weren't born a smoker and if you really wanted to put the effort in to do it, you can stop. But someone who's gay, despite what the wingnuts would have people believe, can't just decide one that that they're not gay any more than a white guy can decide he's no longer white.
Your implied assertion that smokers somehow have it worse than anyone else is complete and utter nonsense.
And yeah you paid for your doctors visits. Congratulations! But lots of people, just like my mother, don't. Who ends up paying for their medical treatment? Taxpayers. Just like the AIG bailouts. Just like the GM bailout. Just like the trillion dollars going to Iraq. All of it comes out of the pocket of the taxpayers.
Even in the cases where the smoker's paying their own medical expenses, there's still the effects of lost productivity and the resources going into keeping someone alive who is deliberately killing themselves and all the people around them that have their health effected by both second hand and third hand smoke. So not only do I, the taxpayer, have to pay for all those people without medical insurance and without the ability to pay for their own treatment I've gotta pay for my own potential lung cancer for the sin of breathing within the proximity of a smoker. Like I said - a drag on the economy.
Further taxation only increases the 'drag' on the economy, as more money is taken out of circulation and removed from said economy.
Obviously not too much, since Phillip Morris' profit is up 29% this year to $1.87 billion dollars despite the fact that they're selling people what is effectively highly addictive poison. I'm sure the legislature would prefer banning nicotine all together and there's no doubt enough popular support to do it - but then of course there's the $68 million dollars lobbyists for big tobacco your lack of representation has given to Congress since 1990 (74% of which went to Republicans I note). I only see about $15 million for GBLT issues during that same period. That must be why homosexual couples are denied the right to adopt, but Phillip Morris still has the right to kill people. Because the GBLT community aren't spending as much money buying Congress.
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and he about laughed me out of the store. I said "Well.. I dunno, it's not like I smoke it. It's for my grandfather. How much does a person smoke normally?"
Given that a cigarette holds about 2 grams, and a pound is 453.6 grams. You'd be able to make 226.8 cigs with one pound. Which, at 20 per pack would make you about 11 packs or one pack more than what's in a carton with 6 cigs left over. Which, according to my mother is still about $12 dollar savings over buying an actual carton.
Before you think I'm picking on you just to be a dick, I do think it's utterly fucking ridiculous that the price is being artificially inflated by enormous and unfair taxes. Which I agree is unfairly targeting smokers. But unlike potheads at least you can still legally buy or grow your own addiction without a prison sentence.
Hmm.. actually that's not a bad idea. Hydroponic Tobacco. Probably the purest nicotine you've put in your body since you started smoking.
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I get about 30 packs worth out of a pound... the difference being that even with mass equivalence, the cut of what I use is entirely different than that found in the average cigarette, producing a looser density in the finished product. Not to mention the aggregate weight of 'smoothing' additives that are added to tobacco in the name-brand factories. Its not the nicotine that kills you... its the tar and carbon.
I'm not an asshole smoker. I respect the wishes of those around me not to smoke around them if they don't want me to. I have no problems with that. My big beef is that while my strife of being shit upon by society is much less than that of the GLBi's, its still being shit upon, and condoning that in any free society goes against everything that that free society supposedly stands for. You can't pick and choose equalities. Otherwise, its just selective victimization... legislated or social. Its the merri-go-round of political scapegoats, and very structure of power has been molded to take advantage of it. Its the very structure that permitted actions such as you have described to perpetuate themselves through the last century... just another form of discrimination. Its conditions people to think it 'okay' to think of someone else as dirt, or someone to be punished for daring to exist, so long as that's the politically acceptable target of the 'two minutes hate' of the day. Its cyclic and it won't end by itself. And people get caught up in it sooo easily.
And people are getting fired from their jobs for smoking.(among others)
Smokers are being labeled as 'unfit parents' and Should not be allowed to have kids...
I myself have been spit at on a public street whilst I was in my vehicle, have had thrash thrown at me... Do I deserve that? I don't think I do.
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There's -always- an asshole in every crowd who's going to treat you like dirt because you are different. That's called human nature. It's not right and it sucks.
As far as the Scott Rodrigues, if he's being treated like that he should definitely fight it - especially if it's a policy put into place after he was hired and not something he agreed to as a consequence of his employment. If you're being abused, you should fight it. I said the same thing to you that I do when I hear any other group or individual talking about what they see as abuse. Stand up and do something about it. There's a reason why I go into political topics in this LJ. There's a reason why I get all fiery and passionate when some politician dickhead does something illegal. Because I want people to care and to do something - anything - other than just be apathetic about it. Apathy is how we ended up with our civil rights being an illusion where - even in the Obama administration - you can still be disappeared into the ether and have Obama claim state secrets to keep it under wraps.
But that is a hell of a sight different from someone beating you to death and then mocking the event on a website as though you deserved it just because you smoked like what happened to Matt Shepard. That's the kind stuff you're trying to say is equivalent to you being taxed? That's retarded.
Incidentally, your Child abuse link is from Australia. The Ash site is from the US but doesn't actually name any names and is an advocacy site. Doing some searches, the only places I could find talking or having banned adoption by smokers was in the UK. Both while prejudicial at the very least in part, neither of which constitutes proof that you are in fact the most hated and oppressed minority in this country unless of course you are planning on moving to the UK or Australia. Actually you are more likely to be hated and discriminated against because you're an Atheist* and because you're big than because you smoke. This does not, however, excuse what you say happened to you.
Atheists are Distrusted - American Sociological Association
Survey: U.S. trust lowest for atheists - MnDaily
Representative tries to put the fear of God in atheist - Chicago Tribune
Maryland Bill of Rights Article 36 & 37
Religious discrimination in the constitutions of seven states - religioustolerance.org
McCreary County v ACLU - Scalia "ok to disregard polytheists and atheists"
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