Warning: Smoking ban hazardous to the tenure of Supreme Court justices

By Jim Waters

I am not a smoker. In fact, I dislike second-hand smoke so much that I have been known to tell rude smokers in restaurants to blow their smoke in another direction at least until I finish dessert.

However, as much as I dislike smoking, the thought of government trying to regulate that activity is even more distasteful. I can walk away from a smoky restaurant, but I can't leave behind the organized force of government.

Freedom-loving Kentuckians should take exception to a recent state Supreme Court ruling upholding the iron fist of the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council, which has voted to ban smoking in private businesses.

If politically unpopular but legal activities such as smoking can be outlawed, what could be next? Elected officials confiscating a privately owned water company? If Kentucky's judicial system fails to protect the property rights of its citizenry from a government determined to eliminate them, what will?

In sustaining Lexington's smoking ban, a majority of the Kentucky Supreme Court sides with the confiscatory behavior of government while the dissenting opinion upholds liberty and the individual's right to private property.

On the wrong side of a six-to-one decision, Kentucky Supreme Court Justice William Graves of Paducah courageously warns that the ban is "arbitrary" and "oppressive" because it represents the confiscation of private property.

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