Hey, you! Stop smoking in my atmosphere!

That’s the message from New York City, where the mayor and health commissioner have just released a policy agenda called “Take Care New York 1012.” Page 10 of the document says the city’s health department “will work with the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation and other entities to expand smoke-free spaces to include city parks and public beaches.” The city council speaker is very interested in the idea, but her help might not be necessary if the parks department can implement the ban as a regulation.
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Then the crusade moved on to apartment buildings, extending the same theory: You can’t smoke in your apartment, because the smoke seeps under your door into hallways and other people’s apartments.

Now this rationale has moved outdoors. Way outdoors. David Kessler, the former FDA commissioner who led the anti-smoking fight in the 1990s, says New York City is doing the right thing, because “the majority of the population today doesn’t want to be breathing in tobacco smoke, whether indoors or outdoors.”
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But do I have the right to that standard of purity? If so, doesn’t that justify a ban on smoking absolutely anywhere?

Anti-abortion conservatives are proposing a new constitutional amendment that critics claim would make it a crime to take birth control pills in Florida.

The “Personhood Amendment” that conservative activists are filing today in Tallahassee would add language to the state constitution that defines someone as a “person,” regardless of age or health status, “from the beginning of the biological development of that human being.”

Pat McEwen of Palm Bay is one of two leaders of the loose collection of activists, collectively known as Personhood Florida.