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By Marion Edwyn Harrison, Esq.
March 31, 2008
Truly “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” - often the worse if one wears contact lenses. Even more seriously, smoke also gets in the lungs, causes cancer and otherwise debilitates the smoking human body. No informed person doubts the foregoing.
For those reasons, it is not only wise to refrain from smoking, especially of cigarettes, but it is at least unpleasant, sometimes debilitating, to be trapped in a place in which smoke permeates the air. Accordingly, no reasoned argument can be made against the absolute prohibition of smoking in all kinds of public places - aircraft, buses, subways, taxis, trolley cars, trains; food and other stores; elevators; hospitals and other medical, dental and veterinary facilities; restrooms; theaters; non-private offices and other non-private workplaces; lots more.
However, bars and restaurants are another story (except for their kitchens, in which employees should be protected, or restrooms). In a country founded in part upon personal freedom, a bar or restaurant proprietor ought to have the right to forbid or to permit smoking, or to limit smoking to a particular room, so long as the proprietor makes the opportunity or the prohibition clear to a potential patron.
As smoking prohibitions have caught on, a certain inconsistency about prohibitions here and there is developing. As a matter of law and morality nobody should be, or lawfully can be, denied entry into a commercial or public place based upon race or ethnicity. However, through our American history, and not necessarily with regard to race or ethnicity, there have been limitations upon, or restrictions concerning, dress. The most obvious is nudity.
Now, however, some people are agitating to prohibit a bar or restaurant from banning female patrons wearing shorts (or topless next?); male patrons wearing no jacket, wearing a turban or with a dreadlocks hairdo. The argument against a turban prohibition is religious discrimination, against a dreadlocks prohibition racial discrimination. The arguments as to the other dress requirements simply are stylistic or the quest for a level of dignity.
Nobody is required to drink in a certain bar or to eat in a certain restaurant. Management should have the traditional right to choose its decorum and level of dignity absent racial or religious discrimination. Of course, this is a matter for local, possibly State, attention. Notwithstanding the intrusion of the Federal Government into State and local matters never envisioned by the Founders or practiced until recent years, this subject is another as to which the Feds should take no position. Restrictions upon free enterprise and the rights of like-minded people to gather together are not unlike smoke. Unreasonable restrictions, like smoke, unobtrusively can damage.
Marion Edwyn Harrison is President of, and Counsel to, the Free Congress Foundation
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