There's not a lot of point in explaining the overwhelming irony in calling a song with the title "Smokers Are Scum" a gentle song to the ironically impaired. But the constant comparisons to race-based discrimination and discrimination against sexual orientation is wildly off the mark, instructively so. Smokers are, again, not a protected class of people under the law. They have tried mightily to achieve this protected status (it's a great story) but can't, of course, because (of course) they can quit. You can't quit being black, etc.

But it is certainly true that vilifying smokers is pointless. The song flirts with that, but specifies repeatedly that it is about smokers who claim the "sheer inconvenience of walking away" is too much for them, and if you haven't met those smokers, stroll down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. The song is about gratuitous, deliberate exposure, and if you won't take the word of the songwriter I'm wondering whose word you'd take.

A statistical majority of smokers want to quit and, as I've said before, that same statistical majority (in the US) overwhelming support smoking restrictions in restaurants, etc., for public health reasons. Restrictions against deadly tobacco smoke doesn't discriminate against smokers, since they can simply smoke somewhere else where they don't affect others. But it is far from dangerous to discriminate against them in housing, employment, seating in restaurants, etc. On the contrary, it is dangerous not to discriminate against them, because you jeopardize others' health so radically that you jeopardize your business legally, and nonsmokers so obviously have to keep breathing. On July 17th, 2009, the Housing and Urban Development Department (US) issued a memorandum advising that all public housing should be smokefree because of the serious jeopardy to children from second and thirdhand smoke exposure. That doesn't mean smokers wouldn't have access to housing. It only means they can't smoke there, or that eventually they won't be able to, because of the impact on their neighbors.

I appreciate that it's hard to quit, but smokers know they can. Hell, it's hard to remember to bring canvas shopping bags to the market, but I think I'm finally there. I just keep about thirty of them in my bike baskets and in my car so they practically strangle me on the way there.