Merry Christmas to YOU, too!
Posted on 12/16/2005 10:57:51 AM PST by kingattax
Anti-smoking activists who are driving cigarettes from public places across the country are now targeting private homes -- especially those with children.
Their efforts so far have contributed to regulations in three states -- Maine, Oklahoma and Vermont -- forbidding foster parents from smoking around children. Parental smoking also has become a critical point in some child-custody cases, including ones in Virginia and Maryland.
In a highly publicized Virginia case, a judge barred Caroline County resident Tamara Silvius from smoking around her children as a condition for child visitation. Mrs. Silvius, a waitress at a truck stop in Doswell, Va., calls herself "highly disappointed" with the court's ruling.
"I'm an adult. Who is anybody to tell me I can't smoke or drink?" she said in an interview yesterday.
An appeals court upheld the ruling, but not before one judge raised questions about the extent to which a court should become involved in parental rights and whether certain behavior is harmful or simply not in a child's best interest. Mrs. Silvius says she complied with the decision by altering her smoking habits.
"My children know not to come around when I'm on the front porch with my morning coffee, tending to my cows or out in my garden, because I'm having a cigarette," she said. Still, she thinks this was not a matter for the courts because it was not proven that she posed a risk to her children's health.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
I suggest you prove your statement, if not go away
Merry Christmas to YOU, too!
You got any idea what the stats are for the life expectancy of babies born in a hospital vs the life expectancy of babies born in a ditch?
100% agreement
If you smoke around your kids then you are an idiot but the courts need to stay the freak out of it
great pic ! :)
nope, please enlighten me.
My mother never allowed my father, who was a smoker until recently, to smoke in our sight.
My dad would go to the grocery store to buy precisely one item every evening and take a ten-minute "walk" after every dinner.
I didn't realize why until I was in my teens.
I think my mom's policy was a good one.
"My children know not to come around when I'm on the front porch with my morning coffee, tending to my cows or out in my garden, because I'm having a cigarette," she said.
She is smoking AWAY from her kids and gave the kids forewarning to stay away from her while she did so (10 minutes to smoke a cig at most), I do the same with my grandkids. I tell them when I am going to go out on the porch and smoke, they know that they need to go play in the yard or in the house away from where I am at. That ruling is just wrong.
Thanks!
Hehe!
I'd bet you're probably correct.
STOP RIGHT THERE! Most of us HAVE our own health insurance, thank you! Don't be lumping all of us in with the poor more mode of having to pay for us.
No one pays for ME! NO one.
Prove it. I see these inane statistics about how many kids have died through second hand smoke, and it just proves the maxim that the public is more willing to swallow a big lie than a small one.
There isn't a shred of medical evidence that links anything definitively to second hand smoke other than stinky clothes.
As a marketing person, a conservative, and a non-smoker, this whole 'stop smoking around the kids thing' is the biggest whopper ever sold anyone, anywhere, and the end is simply the use of your own kids to steal more of your liberty.
That's it. If smoking is as evil as everyone says it is, then ban it, and don't even think of banning it unless you plan to ban alcohol too.
We KNOW there is a link between the use of alcohol and the development of the fetus in the womb. We also know there is a correlation between alcohol abuse and child abuse.
So, since nobody has the balls to go after either smoking or drinking as legal activities that should be made illegal, let's just find another hobby beside trying to tell people what they can and cannot do in their own homes.
Lefties will tell us they're doing it in the name of "freedom".
You have no idea what you are talking about, smokers do not cost society any more than non-smokers do.
Take up your cost issues with lawmakers that force hospitals to treat illegals and other deadbeats that don't pay anything, causing costs to ogo up for ALL of us.
Thank you.
I do not smoke in front of my kids. Nor drink. But the nazis need to stay out of our homes.
LOL. That is what I do
Actually, smokers are a net plus for both government and insurers. Smokers pay onerous taxes on their cigarettes, and pay in all their lives to SocSec and medicare. Then, if you believe the rhetoric, they die young and don't take as much back out of SocSec and medicare as nonsmokers do.
It's a good deal for insurers too. Smokers pay higher premiums, but tend to die of cheap diseases. Heart disease and lung cancer... wham, bang, over. No lingering about in elder-care facilities running up decades of more and more expensive medical costs.
Smokers are subsidizing non-smokers' insurance, not the other way around.
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