Rights as an exclusive concept.

If I may, boo-hoo. This is an example of something that's really been bothering me.

In the past I-don't-even-know-how-long-anymore, I've seen an avalanche of letters to the newspapers around here, carping and whining about the Ft. Wayne smoking ban and how evil it supposedly is. People compare it to Bush's warrantless wiretaps, free speech violations, even Nazism. It's all rhetorically unsound, to put it nicely, and there's simple reasons for that: why shouldn't people be disallowed to endanger the health of others? For all the endless screaming about "smokers' rights" I see in many of these letters, nobody thinks about the rights of non-smokers to go to the places they WANT to go, without being subject to health-endangering smoke. As for the angle that it's "taking away the freedoms of business owners", do these people complain about business owners being told they have to follows health codes or fire codes? These laws are founded in the same concept: that the public's health is served by disallowing certain things.

Ultimately, I say this: If smokers don't like it, don't go out, or step outside. Your rights end where my lungs begin.