Anti-tobacco legisltion, anti-alchohol legislation and the Mormon Church

On the discussion board connected with the article I just posted about someone made a very telling comment about Kansas, Utah and tobacco regulation.
This person pointed out they had been on their mission in Kansas when the use of tobacco in public buildings was outlawed. On their return to Utah they found a similar debate going in Utah and a claim that those who were trying to outlaw the use of tobacco in public buildings were trying to impose their religion on others.
The problem is that this made no sense. Such measures had been enacted in other states where not one of the people voting for it had a religious objection to tobacco use.
This brings to mind one of the most bizarrely misguided members I ever met on my mission. I do not remember how I had the misfortune to have to listen to this lady's discourse on the subject, but somehow I ended up having to listen to her explain why she liked living in Las Vegas so much more than Ogden, Utah. The reason, her children were exposed to tobacco smoke in Las Vegas.
Evidently this lady had missed every study about the negative effects of second hand smoke. She is the ultra example of someone who some how thinks you are better off being exposed to evil early and often. She would probably be glad to have her kindergartners read the book "Prince and Prince" or have her eight-year-old daughter tuaght in school about sex change operations. OK, maybe that is a major jump, but actually if she had any logic in her thoughts at all, that would be her conclusion.
I guess this lady also figured that California was under the control of an even more pro-Mormon administration than Utah since in California they have outlawed the use of tobacco in any public buildings, while Utah still allows it in private clubs.
This brings me to my next big issue. Some people try to claim bizarre things like "adulthood is not legal in Utah because they do not have bars". There are two really odd ideas here. One is that a bar and drinking alchohol are neccesary prerequisites to being an adult.
It reminds me of my Dad's discourse on how adult is both good and bad, which we can see from the phrase "that was very adult of you" as opposed to "adult bookstores".
Beyond this, Utah has liquor stores, private clubs and many other ways that liquor is dispensed. I disagree with Governor Huntsman's push to end the private clubs membership fees.
Does Utah want to have drunk driving, spousal abuse and all the other wonderful things that come with bars?
Right now in Michigan there is a push to ban the smoking of tabacco in all public buildings. This is vigorously opposed by the restraunt lobby who claim they will loose major revenues from this.
The fact of the matter is that some restrunts in Michigan have no smoking areas that are jokes. You often have to wait significantly longer to get seated in no smoking areas, and the chances of going to a smoke free bowling alley are slim to none.
It is better than when I was young. I can vaguely remember when they had a smoking section in McDonalds. I remember when I was little we would always smell of smoke when we came back from the barbers. That shop now has a no smoking policy.
During the two years I was a student at Wayne State they stated trying to publicize the no smoking within 20 feet of a building rule. I saw many people light up before they came out the door, and I have indelibly imprinted on my mind the image of the guy leaning aginst the no smoking sign on the way as he puffs away.
Smoking at bus stops was atrocious, and there were some bus drivers who would smoke on the bus while on break.
The biggst hold up on the smoking ban in the last legislative session was the question of whether it would extend to the casinos in Detroit. I did not follow it very closely, but I would not be surpised if one issue brought up was the fact that a smoking ban on the casinos in Detroit would not be applicable to the casinos on the Indian reservatins, and in theory might lead to even more flow of money to the "out state" casinos as opposed to those in Detroit.
In Michigan "out-state" is a truly bizarre term. It is used for the area of the state not in Detroit or its suburbs.
Out-state is a very heavily Republican area, with a few exceptions. Even the Democrats tend to have different goals then those from Meto-Detroit.
Yet, the biggest thing about out-state is that it is largely ignored by those in Metro-Detroit. I Metro-Detroit there has been a long standing division between the city and the suburbs. This is sometimes seen as a African-American/European-American divide. However the truth is the Groose Pointes, extremely affluent suburbs just to the east of the city, instituted their residence-only park policies when the inhabitants of the eat side of Detroit were overwhelmingly of European descent, to a large extent Belgian and Italian immigrants. It was not blacks butlow class whites they orignially sought to exclude.
Today the issue is again complexed. Southfield Public Schools have a higher percentage of African American students than Detroit Public Schools. Southfield may not be the best schools, but they still are among those who seek to ferret out students who live in other districts and attend them.
It is true that most many suburban police departments still have zero African-Americans on their forces, even where the city they are for has 10% or more of its population that is African-American.
This situation is not neccesarily caused by racial prejudice though. The fact of the matter is that 20 years ago almost every suburb of Detroit had les than 1% African-American population. When I graduated from High School in 2000 there was one African American in my graduating class. When my brother Enoch graduated from the same high school last June, there were probably 30 to 40 African Americans.
Another example is none of the African Americans in the Bloomfield Hills 2nd Ward live in Detoit and none of our Detroit residents are African Americans. We may be down to zero of the latter, but at least for a time Paul gave the latter category meaning, and for a time we had a few Latinos coming to our ward who lived in Detroit.
Of course we can now go beyond black and white. The number of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, East Indian and Bangladeshi people in Metro-Detroit shows that many people can not be put in either racial category. Even the classification of Iraqis as white is suspect, and the classification of the Yemenis in the same way is downright ludicrous.
On the other hand, who really things of a mixed race native of Swaziland as being "black". What of an East Indian descended native of Zambia. If they are 3/4ths native Zambian and 1/4th east Indian do they qualify as black?
For what it is worth the "one drop rule" is based on a pre-Mendelian understanding of inheretance. You do not in actuallity inherit equally from all your ancestors. While half your genes come from your father and half from your mother, it is theoretically possible that you have a grandmother who you have inhereted 0 genes from. This is very unlikely, however outside of your direct paternal and direct materal line, if you go back about 400 years to the point when you have over 1000 ancestors, it is possible that there are some ancestors from whom you have inherited no traits.
Since inheretance is in discreete units, at some point you have to start getting ancestors from whom you have inherited no traits.
Of course race is a social-historical-cultural construct and not a biological relity. However, too often people speak of it as if it is the latter, and for better or ill there is a set of current medical studies that start with the physical reaity of race as a base assumption. Until we can deconstuct and de-colorize race, I will feel a strugle with the current rhetoric on the subject.