Public places I can see, but business owners (restaurants, bars, beauty shops) should have been allowed to decide for themselves whether they wanted smoking allowed in their establishment…their customers should have dictated this to them through their pocketbook. Hasn’t that always been the american way?

I was going to ignore this troll, but I’m tired of seeing this particular straw-man go unchallenged. The argument for the smoking ban in the vast majority of places it’s been enacted is that it’s a workplace safety issue, not a customer safety issue. For example, in Los Angeles, owner-operated establishments are exempt from the law.

As for the food/smoking connection, there’s a huge difference between taxing cigarettes (which are a luxury good, and always unhealthy) to make the price more closely reflect their true cost, and banning fat people from eating (which is more or less a necessity, and is usually healthy).

I suppose those without access to a kitchen could curl up in a corner with a head of lettuce or an MRE. That wouldn’t be discriminatory, right?

First, restaurants and bars were made responsible for other folks’ drinking: you get drunk, you hit someone with your car, the last restaurant who served you a drink pays for the damage.

Then it was the smokers. Public places I can see, but business owners (restaurants, bars, beauty shops) should have been allowed to decide for themselves whether they wanted smoking allowed in their establishment…their customers should have dictated this to them through their pocketbook. Hasn’t that always been the american way?

I work in a business that serves mostly fried junk food (I eat elsewhere). Twice a day, I go outside in the cold and the rain to smoke. Invariably, some incredibly fat person will pass me and remind me smoking is bad for me. Then they wobble on into the store and buy for themselves and their fat little kids as much fried junk as they can carry out.

I’m not saying I’m for the fat people ban. I’m against government intrusion of this type. I believe that everyone has bad habits, and it isn’t the government’s place to stop that. But fair is fair. All you fat people who rallied around the smoking bans need to take your medicine just like the smokers had to.

I mean, really, if smoking around your kid can be considered child abuse, then feeding fried junk to an already fat child should also be considered child abuse (and don’t think this law won’t get to that eventually.) All the same logic applies…drain on the health system, etc.

And I must confess, when sweets and fat-filled foods start getting taxed out of sight like cigarettes, I’m not going to be all that inclined to fight for your freedom to eat, any more than you fought for my freedom to smoke. Because, well, I’m not fat, and I don’t eat that junk.

Everyone needs to wake up. If the government isn’t stopped from intruding in our businesses and lives, these types of laws will just get more and more ridiculous. And given enough time and precedent, the government will eventually get to one of your bad habits. And you won’t like it any more than the smokers or the fat people.

This is probably not the post you were thinking of — it is about the poster’s mother, rather than her aunt; and the cause of death was DVT, not cancer — but it’s a powerful testimony of the same dynamic: the ways in which fat hatred, both external and internalized, can prevent people from seeking or receiving proper medical care:

http://kateharding.net/2007/07/12/fat-hatred-kills-part-one/

They used to deny fat people health insurance just for being fat. Doing so may be good business, but I think you all know what that does to lifespan.

You all know what earning less money does to lifespan. Dead is dead, however you get there.

I wish I could find the post someone posted about her aunt. The aunt went to a series of doctors complaining of a backache. She was fat and the first 6 doctors told her to exercise and lose weight. The 7th doctor said that the pain was from cancer and it was too late to do anything about it. The cancer killed her just as dead as a lynch mob would have.

Nobody that I know of has measured how much the fact that fat people live less long is due to getting inferior medical care. I mostly mean care with respect to treatable diseases unrelated to their fat. Then again there is lack of access to lithotripsy, problems with dosages of drugs which may be impacted by weight and are not tested on fat people, technicians who don’t know how to do ultrasound on a fat person, blood pressure cuffs that do not give an accurate reading on a large arm, and doctors and technicians who don’t know this, X-ray tables not strong enough and medical staff who change what they do for a patient to accomodate this, closed medical equipment, such as ultrasound machines, where the patient cannot physically fit, and even verbal abuse from a doctor that persuades the patient not to seek medical help as early when treating sooner would have made a difference to their disease.

Nobody that I know of has measured how much the fact that fat people live less long is due to them living alone or not having as much of a social safety net as a normal weight person might. If you fall down the stairs and injure yourself badly, and nobody finds you for days, because nobody else is there, that will impact your health. If fat hatred makes you want to be alone, you are more likely to be in that situation. If internalized fat-hatred makes you feel like an unworthy person, how does that impact what you will do about your own survival? How much more likely are you to give up when it would help you not to?

Yes, of course diabetes and heart disease are also factors, but don’t kid yourself about how social attitudes can harm people too.

…so you’re for the abduction of children from their home, based on the presumption of an assumed weight problem.

No, I’m suggesting it a sign of a potential problem that shouldn’t be ignored.

Cause you know, most people didn’t eat themselves fat, I know it’s so hard to belive.

It’s hard to believe because it’s not scientifically true. There are many complex reasons behind why people eat poorly and don’t exercise enough, but they are the mechanisms which cause the body to create fat.

So you’re saying taking a terrifying screaming child from the only home they’ve known, is good for them, cause they might loose weight.

I’m saying that a child’s physical health is important, especially considering it’s interrelated to their emotional health. Obviously you’d need to weigh up the options in each individual case and removing the child from the home is a last resort, but if a child is morbidly obese then it’s a serious health issue and shouldn’t be ignored.

Or even better, adopt a wasting ED, like Anorexia or Bulemia.

Because life is just full of dichotomies. I’d rather see healthy children.

I agree this law is absurd, I just think saying it’s the same issue as childhood obesity is equally absurd. If a child had a drug abuse problem and the parents only encouraged it, how would you deal with the issue? It’d be a different issue if it was an independant adult engaging in the same abuse.

I think the point is that they’re viewing morbid obesity as a disease, like alcoholism or compulsive gambling.

No, the point is that these legislators are proposing a segregation law to exclude fat people from certain public establishments.

What their motives are for the law is imo a secondary concern. That said, however, I will try and address their motives in this comment.

This is completely different from Jim Crow, where it was an act of hatred.

You’re certainly correct; if we asked these legislators what their concerns are, they’d answer that they were acting for the public good, not out of hatred.

Of course, had you asked the legislators responsible for Jim Crow their motives, they would have said the same thing; contemporary defenses of Jim Crow were full of passionate denials of personal prejudice against blacks. It was sometimes even argued that Jim Crow did more good for blacks than whites. Although civil rights activists at the time correctly identified Jim Crow as rooted in hatred, it was many years before “Jim Crow = hatred” became a national (almost) consensus.

My point is not to argue that this proposal is exactly like Jim Crow in every particular; of course it is not. However, it is like Jim Crow in one specific and essential way, which is enough to justify the illustration that accompanies this post, imo.

All policies are defended as being for the public good. However, exactly which group’s oxes are proposed to be gored in defense of the public good is frequently a measure of where those groups stand in society. Even if it were a statistical fact that white Christians of all weights eat too much greasy diner food for their own health, no one would ever propose a law banning white Christians from diners, because white Christians simply have too high a standing in society for that to happen.

The proposal of this law by elected lawmakers is important because it is a signal of how low a class “obese” people have become. It is true that they are doing it for my own good; but it is also true that the reason they are proposing this particular law for my own good, rather than a different, more respectful law, is because the worth of obese people has been devalued.

This is completely different from Jim Crow, where it was an act of hatred. In this case, it’s a patronizing nanny-state attitude of “we know what’s best for you” - you’re sick and it’s our responsibility to fix you.

Is it possible to ‘improve health’ as so many seem to want without degrading fat people? I would have imagined, yes. From what I can gather, it seems not, it seems as if our capacity to recognise when we are being patronised is somehow oversensitive, fine, set out a positive framework of ‘obesity’ reduction. And I’ll see if I can get on board.

I believe there’s a provision in our mod policy against rules lawyering. For the record, the use of abusive ad homs was intended to speak volumes about my unwillingness to engage in good faith discussion — as I don’t believe that D’s assertion is one worth addressing. That doesn’t stop you from addressing it.

If you want to argue against D, do so. If you want to chide other posters, do it on your own blog.

Troll.

Desipis is not a troll, though they is certainly wrong-headed on this subject.

Jackie:

Perhaps you hate children. Why else would you suggest scarring them over something they cannot control.

Perhaps Desipis hadn’t considered those consequences, or doesn’t believe that those would be the consequences.

I think you should warn your community not to let children near your house. If they APPEAR to have too high of a BMI, you might kidnapp them and feed them only vegetables until they’re of a good proper weight. on this issue.

Genevieve:

…crazy dipshit

The immediate resort to abusive ad homs speaks volumes about your (plural) unwillingness to engage in good faith discussion.

So you’re saying taking a terrifying screaming child from the only home they’ve known, is good for them, cause they might loose weight. Or even better, adopt a wasting ED, like Anorexia or Bulemia, cause you know, they’ll always fear they’ll be taken again unless they’re the right weight.

Perhaps you hate children. Why else would you suggest scarring them over something they cannot control. Do you really think it’s so simple as children eating themselves fat? Not giving to the numerous number of things that can cause someone to appear fat, such as genetics, PCOS, ect.

I think you should warn your community not to let children near your house. If they APPEAR to have too high of a BMI, you might kidnapp them and feed them only vegetables until they’re of a good proper weight.

So you want everyone to wait until it is?

Daran: “Legislators aren’t a noticeably thin demographic, and turkeys don’t vote for Chistmas.”

I have to get my thoughts copyrighted.