Let’s find out.
FuriousGeorge, what is you opinion on laws that prohibit minors from purchasing and using tobacco?
My father smoked in the car and went to great lengths to seal it up. I first thought he was concerned that wind would blow out his pipe, but his reaction to anyone cracking a window or coughing was so guilty-angry that I now think he simply didn’t want a window open because it implied that what he was doing was wrong.
At any rate, he would yell at us for opening the windows, seal the car back up, and puff furiously until I began to wonder if he could see the road.
I realize you’re being sarcastic, but there are people who deliberately concentrate smoke in the car and despise open windows.
This law will come (if it comes at all) far too late for our family.
Sailboat
Another child of three chainsmoking parents who spent her childhood wheezing and nauseated in a sealed-up car in Alaska. Then in warmer weather when you could open your window without being snapped at, the ashes would fly into your eyes. Ya’ll defensive smokers can all go collectively smoke a large pole. Some of us had these parents-- the same ones who took it as a personal affront on their driving abilities if you dared attempt to put on a seat belt. It happens.
Liver’s good for you. Smoke isn’t.
You’re just not doing it right.
We allow parents to make decisions for their children. That includes how much secondhand smoke the child should be exposed to. I’m of the opinion that parents who buy more than 10 bags of chips/cheetos/cheesypoofs per child per year should be fined, at least $200 for the first offense. So there’s something reasonable people can disagree upon as well.
I tend to side with the libertarian arguments with this kind of thing, but I actually think this law makes a lot more sense than banning smoking in bars & restaurants. Adults can make their own decision whether to patronize a smoky establishment, and even if they take kids in, the exposure from an occasional trip to a smoky restaurant will be a lot less than driving around with a parent smoking in the front seat on a regular basis. (Or maybe the law should be that if a bar or restaurant allows smoking, then no children can be served there? Anyway, I digress.)
If a parent can be forced to invest in 3 different car seats for different stages of child growth, and everyone can be forced to wear seatbelts, then I don’t see how this is really any different. There could be a case made that driving around in a smoke-filled vehicle is just as hazardous to health, if not more so, than driving around in the back seat without a seatbelt.
I want to amend my first post… This law is really not anti-libertarian at all. I think one can reasonably argue that the government should step in to prevent coercion of parents putting children in dangerous situations. If a parent is smoking in the car with his/her minor child, there’s a very good change that that is not a one-time deal. And children spend lots of time in their parents’ cars.
They do? Maybe that’s where the health problems are coming from.
The child has a property right in his lungs. Why should the parent’s right to use his property infringe on the child’s property right? What is the child’s recourse if he is damaged by the smoking? Does he get to sue his parents?
Well then, why make central plans that cover everyone as though everyone were identical? No smoking in any car of any kind with kids in it ever? That’s just Neanderthal in its conception.
You have me confused with someone who talked about minor children making personal choices. I made my child’s choices for her.
Possibly. Maybe. But stop pretending that people can’t roll down a window or open a vent. If their car is that much of a junker, they shouldn’t be hauling kids around in it anyway. It could break down and leave them stranded. (I’m sure you would also stipulate that they don’t have cell phones and can’t walk.)
But you brought up the notion of telling me what to do with my children. If you can’t take it, don’t dish it out.
My opinion is that it is illegal. The government has set up stringent rules based on a randomly picked number equal to the number of years that a person has lived since the day he or she was born. This law, however, has nothing to do with the sale of tobacco to minors.
This is about a government making for sale a product, making money from said product, and then stepping into a person’s home and saying nope… not here… umm no, not there either… and there is COMPLETELY out. I say to the government, “Go fuck yourselves.”
If the government is that concerned with the welfare of the children and the health of its citizens, ban the fuckers all together. Because to say that it’s alot safer to smoke in your home in front of your childern than in your car is nothing but equivocating bullshit. Quit playing games and quit fucking with our personal liberties.
But the government officials of this country couldnt give a rat’s ass less about the children nor the citizens of this country. What they care about is winning the next election. It is so much talking points and getting their name in the papers.
As far as I know, minor children have very little rights with regard to their bodies, circumstances and upbringing. Those decisions are left to the parents. Parent’s get to decide what foods they eat, what religion they are raised in, circumcision, schooling (home, private, or public), what immunizations they are given, what kind of medical care they recieve. and what the home environment is like and much much more. Of course, there are some restrictions with regard to immediate obvious dangers (shooting them, sharpening an axe on their forehead, forcing them to wash the plugged-in radio in the bathtub, forcing them to listen to Beyonce, etc.); but most of those things are illegal whether the victim is a child or an adult.
Any of the aforementioned areas could be detrimental to the child in any number of circumstances. Feed them the wrong food, they die of an allergic reaction or grow to be obese. If you send them to the wrong school, they may graduate without being able to spell their own name. Parents are given the task, right or wrong, of raising their children as they deem fit in many, many cases.
In this country, today, smoking is a perfectly legal activity, right or wrong. Most smoking parents know the risks of smoking and the effects that it has on those around them. It is up to them to make the decisions based on the information they have how to handle it ESPECIALLY in their own homes or in their car. If you want to ban public smoking for the good of the community, knock yourself out. But don’t cry “will someone think of the children” and expect me to follow like a lamb to the slaughter.
<where is that Beyonce CD…>
Well, that’s not quite true. Children have quite a broad spectrum of rights, although they are not as extensive as adults. What we do is let the guardian (not necessarily the parent) exercise those rights on the behalf of the child. But the guardian has to do so in a way that’s in the child’s interest. Otherwise, the child is subject to removal and the guardian is subject to sanction.
A child most certainly has a property right in its body. Everybody does.
Yes, parents get to determine what their kids eat, within a certain range of choices. If a parent was feeding its toddler an exclusive diet of coke and cheetos, I can’t think of a single state which would not be able to intervene. The same is true for immunizations. A parent will not have a choice about certain immunizations in most states. You’re simply making factually incorrect statements here.
Again, incorrect. There’s a whole spectrum of wrong choices which a parent is not allowed to make for their child.
Ok, my argument wasn’t “will someone think of the children,” and that’s a completely false characterization of it. My argument is that children, like everyone else, have property rights in their bodies. You keep on about the parent’s property rights, while completely ignoring the children’s property rights.
It doesn’t matter that smoking is legal. So is spewing smoke from a factory. But if the smoke, either from a cigarette or a factory, is producing toxins which are damanging somebody elses property rights, then the government should step in and prevent it.
If a parent were to insist that his or her child sit in a tiny room filled with smoke for, say, one hour three times per week, the state would step in on behalf of the child. This isn’t really any different. Similarly, if a parent were to refuse to allow the child access to needed health care, the state would step in-- and rightly so.
I would like to clarify my argument, since I was in a bit of a hurry last time.
There’s a lot of ways to define rights. One way to do this is to look at our civil causes of action. Many of these involve an infringement of a specific right. For example, let’s say I damage your property. You can sue me to recover the damages. But the reason you can sue me is that I’ve infringed on your property right. If I destroy a completely unrelated person’s property, you don’t get to sue me, because you have no property right that has been infringed.
Now, children most certainly do have rights. A lot of them. But, as I alluded to earlier, we assume that children are incompetent to exercise and protect their rights. So, we vest that ability in the child’s guardian, who is usually the parent. But the parent isn’t allowed to exercise the child’s right in any fashion he sees fit. He has to take the child’s interest into account. If he doesn’t, then there is potential civil and criminal liability.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Let’s say a child comes into money. The guardian is allowed to manage that money on behalf of the child. But he can’t just use the money in any willy-nilly fashion. If he does, the child can sue. This is exactly what Gary Coleman did when he sued his parents for mismanaging the money he earned as a child actor. If Gary Coleman didn’t have a distinct property right in his money, he wouldn’t have been able to sue.
Another example. Let’s say a child is injured by somebody. The parent of the child can sue that person. But the parent is suing on the child’s behalf, for a violation of the child’s right. Although the parent could likely also sue over his own damages as well, for the actual injury to the child, it is the child (through his parent) who is doing the suing.
Now, whether we choose to characterize somebody’s rights in their lungs as a property right, or a personal autonomy right, or a bodily integrity right, there exists some right that people, including children, have over their own lungs. Thus, if a person deliberately exposes a child to toxins, then they are violating that child’s rights.
I’m fully aware that the parent has a property right in his own car or his own home. And yes, parents do have rights with regards to their children. But this is not an issue of taking away a parent’s rights or their property rights. This is an issue of competing rights which are infringing on each other.
Generally, when that happens, you have a few choices: 1) you could only honor the first party’s rights (say, the parent), you could only honor the second party’s rights (say, the child), or 3) you could find some balance which attempts to minimize the infringement in both parties’ rights. Generally, in the US, we go for option 3, and for me, options 1 and 2 make no sense whatsoever.
There’s a lot of ways to balance rights. One could assign monetary values to the loss of the rights and make sure that nobody loses more than the other. In the case of smoking, if we assign values, I’m hard pressed to see that the loss of ability to smoke in the car is more damaging than the asthma and lung cancer (even accounting for probabilities). For me, I tend to assign very high values to health. So, rather than preventing a parent from smoking entirely, we can simply limit the parents ability to smoke in locations which are more likely to damage the child, such as in the car. That is a balancing.
My problem with your argument, FuriousGeorge is that you are completely ignoring the child’s right and refusing to do any balancing here. We can certainly differ about whether a car ban is the appropriate result of the balancing, but I’m simply not going to agree with you that a child’s right shouldn’t weigh in here.
I’m not making an argument that we should ban smoking entirely, and this is an unreasonable leap to take from my arguments. We routinely restrict the circumstances under which potentially dangerous activities take place without banning them in their entirety.
Actually, the only reason he was able to sue them was because of a set of laws specifically designed to prohibit some uses of a child actor’s money by his parent or guardian. They were called “Jackie Coogan” laws.
Jeez, George, I’ll bet your head about exploded when Colorado started requiring people to buckle up and fining them for not having their small children strapped into an adequate car seat!
Colorado has much, much, much bigger problems than Bob FitzGerald. Starting with, but not limited to, Tom Tancredo. Oh, yeah, and Marilyn Musgrave.
I don’t deny that FitzGerald may be an ass hat of the first degree. But he’s pretty small potatoes compared to Tancredo, Musgrave and some of the rest…
Actually, even if this was true (which it isn’t), it doesn’t in any way change my argument, but rather supports it. In any case, there are a number of common law and statutory torts which Coleman could have sued under, including misappropriation and breach of fiduciary duty.
And actually, Coogan money goes directly into a blocked trust account directly from the employer. Coleman’s parents wouldn’t have had access to the Coogan money to begin with.