Way back in 2014 I reported on a bunch of totalitarian Democrats who wanted to ban birthday cake in school. Flash forward and the moral police on the left are as busy as ever, working tirelessly to chip away individual freedoms in the Marxist States of America.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration this month will consider a potential ban on the sale of menthol cigarettes in the United States.
According to Just the News, “Advocates have cited the purported disparate health impacts that menthols have on nonwhite smokers. Among young adult black American smokers, 85% smoke menthols, as opposed to less than a third of white smokers. Young children who start smoking are also at high likelihood for smoking menthols, data indicate.”
Sadly, it’s actually more common for pigs to fly than it is to find a Democrat who doesn’t want to infringe on your freedom to choose, even when those freedoms may result in harmful or unhealthy behaviors.
And though it is politically incorrect to say, I don’t know too many brothers who would take a Marlborough over a Kool.
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But Democrats are especially fond of interfering in the rights of minorities as their decades-long social welfare experiment and gun-control laws can attest.
Rather than focusing on the violence that is decimating black Americans and restoring the family unit, they want to once-again legislate behavior. It’s truly maddening.
Dictating what others are allowed and not allowed to do or the quantity or frequency in which they may indulge is like giving a meth pipe full of rock to an addict—Democrats are going to fire up that bowl.
If Democrats can’t outright ban something they deem undesirable under the guise of caring about minorities, children or the planet, they will find a way to tax it to death, such as the already completely lopsided taxing of tobacco.
It could even be said that the exorbitant taxing of tobacco was an indirect cause of Eric Garner’s death. Garner was arrested for allegedly selling untaxed, loose cigarettes when police put him in a chokehold that was said to have caused his death.
What is missing from the story is that there was a street market for single cigarette sales because of the high taxes on tobacco in New York City.
The elite ruling class of bureaucrats believe they know what’s best for us to consume, or even how much or often we consume it, such as New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s infamous Big Gulp ban.
What is at work here isn’t bureaucrats working to make black Americans healthier, they just believe they are too stupid to figure out that smoking isn’t healthy.
Progressive Democrats are employing the same tactics misguided Christians did when they enacted Prohibition or instituted laws banning the sale of alcohol on Sunday. Because they didn’t want Americans to consume alcohol (for the sake of the children), they found a way to use the laws to enforce their beliefs on others.
In the 1980s, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority was trying to ban music CDs and virtual games they deemed satanic. And just as the Moral Majority was wrong then, so too is Biden’s proposed menthol cigarette ban.
There’s nothing worse than an addict that goes straight and turns into the worst Puritan of all. Actress Angelina Jolie, who though she purportedly had a problem with husband Brad Pitt’s drinking and has turned into some sort of earth mother who only wears dreary colors and drearier clothes, want us to forget that she wore a vial of Billy Bob Thornton’s blood around her neck, french kissed her own brother and was a hard party girl.
Rather than finding Jesus, she’s found global issues. Her new religion is being a Special Envoy to the United Nations under the ultimate feel-good banner of “humanitarian.”
I’m not against Americans pursuing healthy lifestyles or doing all that we can to improve the environment, but the dishonest motivations behind a lot of these Democratic programs is staggering. Legislating individual behaviors doesn’t work any more than banning guns in Democratic cities work.
The passage of any ban on menthol cigarettes will only increase the danger for inner-city black Americans and give rise to a new mafia-run market on “contraband.”
No government program should come at the price of individual liberty—it’s still putting lipstick on a pig, and I don’t want to kiss a pig or take it home to meet the parents.