Selective Health Paternalism

From today's Best of the Web:

The Associated Press reports, "[San Francisco] health officials took steps Thursday toward opening the nation's first legal safe-injection room, where addicts could shoot up heroin, cocaine and other drugs under the supervision of nurses."

Meanwhile in Portland, Maine, the AP reports that "school officials on Thursday defended a decision to allow children as young as 11 to obtain birth-control pills at a middle-school health center."

In both San Francisco and Portland, however, smoking in bars is strictly prohibited. It's bad for your health, after all.

Meanwhile, in other health news:

-- Hillary Clinton makes fun of Americans for being fat.

-- New York City's Health Department will be visiting homes in Harlem to ensure nobody is smoking around children.

San Francisco v. Lawrence

In the 2003 Supreme Court Lawrence v. Texas decision upending every anti-sodomy statute in the country, the nation's highest court ruled that the Constitution's implied right to privacy precluded lawmakers from legislating sexual activity in the confines of a private residence. A debatable proposition, perhaps -- but, now, standing precedent.

More recently, members of a San Francisco suburb City Council unanimously voted to pass the most restrictive smoking ban in the world, effectively outlawing smoking entirely, even in private residences. The only places where smoking would still be allowed are single-family homes that are not part of condos/co-ops/apartment buildings.

Unlike New York and other areas where liberty is taken for granted, Belmont residents revolted, challenging whether these lawmakers should be able to legislate personal behavior in private places.

Which raises an interesting question. If the City Council stands firm, pressing ahead with one of the most brazen subjugations of liberty in modern American history, are these Bay Area legislators prepared to argue before federal courts that the Supreme got it wrong in Lawrence v. Texas?

Another Reason To Bomb San Fran

That bastion of sensitivity, that comfort-zone for the oppressed, that beacon of tolerance, that city of liberal piety, San Francisco, recently saw its locals attack Yale's all-male singing group, The Baker's Dozen, with words like "faggot" and "homo" and, later, with assaults of a more physical variety.

Why?

The Dozen had earlier launched into a patriotic rendition of The Star Spangled Banner.