-By Warner Todd Huston
As America’s dumbest generation gets dumber, teachers unions stand as an important stepping stone to educating our youth. Unfortunately, the stepping stones that the unions represent are paving a road to ruin as opposed to one of success. Still, one teachers union in Pennsylvania has used its power to great effect. Sadly, the effect is not one that has anything to do with education. On the bright side, though, at least it is an issue of reinforcing personal liberty.
It seems that Pennsylvania’s colleges and universities decided to ban smoking everywhere on campuses across the Keystone State. Pursuant to that, rules were made and students and teachers alike were told to leave their butts home, no smoking allowed.
The schools made one tiny miscalculation, though. They imagined that the unions would meekly agree to this universal ban and say nothing forcing teachers to stop smoking on the job. The schools were wrong.
The union responded to the schools by saying that the ban was illegitimate for union employees because the school administrators had not negotiated with the union before putting the ban in place. Ooopsie.
So, the union had the ban overturned. Students and teachers alike are overjoyed. Though the ban hasn’t strictly been lifted for students (only union employees) it is a bit hard for the schools to justify keeping adult students at colleges from smoking but allowing their teachers to do so.
I find this whole argument a bit amusing, though. The FoxNews story linked above has a student saying the following:
“We don’t want to impose our habits on somebody else,” Dugan said. Still, he added, the students wanted everyone else to know it was “our life, our body, our decision…. We weren’t asking for the ability to stand in every doorway to smoke.”
This is the same argument that liberals use to safeguard abortion or, say, drug use, isn’t it? A person may do what they wish with “their body” when it comes to drug use and abortion. Yet they take exactly the opposite stance on smoking. Many liberals are even angling to take the we-know-better-than-you stance on fast food and junk food. So, how does the argument that “it’s our body” work for abortion and drug use, but not for smoking and fast food?
It’s a liberal’s pretzel logic and it’s coming home to bite them in the butts in Pennsylvania. Now, if only we could get a teachers union that cared as much about teaching!
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, RedState.com, Human Events Magazine, AmericanDailyReview.com, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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