If someone is trying to use the democratic process to take away a property owners tight to allow consumption of a legal commodity, it doesn't matter if you say pumpkin or punkin.
They're both the same.
That's an exaggerated, if not entirely baseless, generalization.
Which? That the anti-smokers say that or that the nonsmoking population will make up for the number of smokers?
Almost every smoking ban that has passed in the past 2 years, the controlling authority has been warned that the ban will be bad for business. Almost every time, the anti-smoking cabal has told the controlling authority to, in effect, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain".
The net result is that mom&pop establishments that have been in business for years go under leaving only the corporate establishments in business because they can afford some fall off in business. It's a tax writeoff.
Once the mom&pop establishments are out of the way the corporates come back up to normal only because they are the only game in town. A portion of the people that otherwise would have gone to a mom&pop establishment now have no other choice. They must frequent the corporate establishment if they want to go out at all.
The definition of "anti-smoking" is "someone who is against smoking", period. To tack on the rest warps the definition.
You said "anti-smokers are always saying that the non-smoking population will make up for the smokers staying away."
which means they have no time to do anything else, since all of them are always talking. Use quantified, verifiable statistics instead of generalizations. Where do all of them always say that non-smokers will pick up the slack? Nowhere, because not all of them say it and it's physically impossible to talk non-stop.
good point
But when the restaurant associations supports these bans it is support for regional bans knowing that local bans will hurt restaurants who will lose business to establishments located outside the ban zones.
The anti-smokers then use this resigned, luke-warm support from restaurant owners and exclaim enthusiastically that "See! Even the restaurant owners themselves want a ban!"