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WORLD NET DAILY
March 26, 2002
Smoke and Lose Your Son
By Dennis Prager
The March 25 issue of the New York Law Journal reports that a
New York Supreme Court Justice, Robert F. Julian, has banned
a divorced mother from smoking when her son stays with her. The
13-year-old boy, who lives with his father and grandparents,
has overnight visits with his mother, but she will lose the right
to these visits if she smokes while he is there.
This is an unprecedented ruling. All previous rulings against
parental smoking have been in cases of children with some ailment
that could theoretically be exacerbated by secondhand smoke.
As reported by the Law Journal, Justice Julian himself "said
he was unable to find any decision ordering parents to maintain
a smoke-free environment absent an underlying diagnosis of asthma,
allergy or another disorder."
This ruling is therefore as monumental in importance as it is
unprecedented in law. Justice Julian massively expanded judicial
power over parents by having the court assume the role of parens
patriae ("government as parent").
How did Justice Julian justify his taking over the role of a
parent when there is a parent present? By arguing, the Law Journal
reports, "that courts have not been reluctant to interfere
with parental authority when the risk to a child is great, as
he found it is here" (emphasis added).
There you have it. In what will surely be one of many candidates
for Scariest Ruling of the Year, a judge will not allow a son
to visit his mother if she smokes, despite the fact that the
boy is perfectly healthy.
And it gets worse. The poor mother smokes only in the bathroom
when her son visits. So unless you confuse secondhand smoke with
nuclear fallout, the boy is obviously not adversely affected
by any secondhand smoke. What, then, is this case really about?
It is about using secondhand smoke as a weapon in a custody dispute.
And it is about the consequences of the secondhand-smoke hysteria – a
judge actually believes that secondhand smoke's risk to a person's
health is so great that a child can be removed from a smoking
parent's home.
That a parent – in this case, the father – can use
secondhand smoke as a means of depriving the other parent of
custody rights should frighten even anti-smoking zealots. But,
of course, it won't frighten them. Anti-smoking zealots see no
greater moral good than stopping people from smoking. Hence they
will celebrate, not fear, this unprecedented governmental intrusion
into family life and subversion of parental authority.
On the other hand, those Americans not prone to hysteria about
secondhand smoke should be quaking because of this imperious
ruling.
By this judge's logic, courts may now judge as unfit any parent
(not just one involved in a custody issue) simply on the basis
of the health patterns he or she lives by. This may well mean,
for example, that now that the government has declared obesity
an even bigger killer than smoking, courts may assume the role
of parens patriae if a parent serves desserts to an overweight
child. If you think that is an absurd scenario, think again.
There is no frontier that the combination of health hysteria,
trial lawyers litigating for massive amounts of money and activist
judges will not cross.
It's a good thing the men who saved Western civilization – Winston
Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt – lived before the
current anti-smoking hysteria. The former constantly smoked cigars,
and the latter chain-smoked cigarettes. They would have fared
rather poorly in Justice Julian's courtroom. On the other hand,
the man who almost destroyed the West might have fared rather
well. Adolph Hitler never touched tobacco and led the Nazi campaign
against smoking – the most forceful ever waged. Until America's
today.
Whatever you think about smoking, weep for the mother who cannot
smoke in her own bathroom, lest her son be forbidden from staying
with her. In fact, weep for America. |
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