Pete Robinson: Zero tolerance on smokers
The government announced today that in the interests of public health they will introduce legislation effectively banning all gay bars, saying "We have evidence to suggest a high proportion of AIDS, HIV and Hepatitis is transmitted by the homosexual community. We would be failing in our duty if we did not act to protect the public from the risk of proliferation of these killer diseases".
Of course they're not really. It's a headline you will never read because, quite apart from such ideas being non-PC, we are such a tolerant society. But are we really as über-tolerant as we'd like to believe?
What's missing is choice. I can choose to go into a gay bar or gay club. In fact I have done so, many times. Some of my best friends are gay and I enjoy their company, although not in the biblical sense. Yet I'm sufficiently tolerant and open minded to accompany them to a gay bar and I know what to expect when we get there.
Such establishments are generally meeting places for promiscuous homosexual males, the spring boards for many a man-to-man 'one night stand'. As such the health risks are plain to see. However in today's society we turn a blind eye to any negative aspects of such things.
If anyone finds such antics offensive they have the choice 'not' to go to a gay bar/club. So if they do visit they have no reasonable grounds for complaint. It is legal when all's said and done.
Smoking is also a legal activity, but not in pubs and bars. I cannot go to a smoking bar where both non-smokers and 'antis' alike have the choice to avoid if they want to. "Aha!", I can hear the antis crowing immediately. "But we must have the choice NOT to be subjected to your evil, cancer-inducing smoke... blah blah... sore throats and eyes... blah blah... 800 deaths a year... blah blah... Roy Castle... blah blah... smelling like an ashtray... etc, etc".
Fair enough. If you believe all that twaddle we'll allow publicans the option of separate, sealed and ventilated indoor smoking areas. Or let's return to the government's 2005 election manifesto pledge then we'll have both smoking and non-smoking pubs. You can have as many as you want.
But do you really need all of them? Where's the 'choice' in that? "But WE had no choice before the smoking ban", antis will always reply. "Why should you have one now?"
Well first of all I don't accept the 'tit-for-tat' argument. Smokers never set out to ruin your pleasure and have been only too willing to compromise. Antis were offered a choice before the ban. Many establishments tried the non-smoking option only to find it was not sufficiently supported to make the project viable. The demand simply didn't exist.
However in every town there were pubs that had invested heavily in professionally designed, superior ventilation with large no-smoking areas. For many years it's been easy to find somewhere to have a drink without being irritated by the smoke of others. Fully non-smoking restaurants were also an available option pre-ban.
We smokers didn't campaign to put those pubs and restaurants out of business. We didn't heavily lobby government to force 'all' premises to become smoking venues. We didn't spout skewed junk-science or compile creatively engineered statistics to 'prove' our case. We didn't wage a relentless, obsessive propaganda war against anti-smokers.
Perhaps we should have done. But it's never too late to learn.
