Not a Hoax! Mississippi to Make it Illlegal for Restaurants to Serve the Obese!
A bill in Mississippi would make it illegal to serve obese patrons. When I first read this, words escaped me, and that is rare. Then I thought: Hey, send a copy to the UK. They love surrealistic nonsense like this. Then, I thought: This is too fat a target. So I went to the Mississippi Legislature Web site and looked up HB 282. Sure enough, it was a measure, since dead, to regulate lawyer advertising. And I posted it as such.
Ah, but I was wrong. When I looked again at the bill, I noticed it was from 2006. So, I did another search and, by golly, three legislators, two of whom are Republicans who I thought are supposed to oppose big government, want to force restaurants into being the fat police! I only have one question: When did Mississippi become San Francisco?
Labels: Legislative Follies
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 12:18 PM
10 Comments
10 Comments:
I'm sorry, but the link you posted is incorrect, as it shows the 2006 bill.
The correct link is as follows, and it is not a hoax. http://billstatus.ls.state.ms.us/documents/2008/pdf/HB/0200-0299/HB0282IN.pdf
Thanks, Marcy. I was correcting it as you posted this note. Love my SHS readers for keeping me on my toes!
Since we're talking about Mississippi, you don't have to look far to see a racist reason for the bill. According to recent studies, African-Americans are more likely to be obese than most other groups. This bill obviously targets them in particular (as well as poorer whites). The Bull Connors of the future will be enforcing this bill should it become law.
As someone who has had morbid obesity all his life, I marvel at the extreme hatred, sometimes disguised as "compassion", shown toward the obese as a group. Unlike, say, smoking, or excess drinking followed by driving, my weight does not affect you one iota and is, frankly, nobody else's business. More than likely, those who dislike the overweight and obese have plenty of oxen of their own, ripe for the goring.
Morbid obesity, as opposed to simple overweight, is the result of deeper factors: not "lack of willpower" or "gorging on food", but physical, genetic, psychological, and emotional issues to which society needs to learn to respond in more positive ways, not by humiliation, ridicule, shaming, and abuse. But bills such as this one are simply more of the same old, same old.
The overweight and obese are the last group it is acceptable to treat as (n-words). And given the Mississippi bill's probable true targets, that attitude is no coincidence there.
The legislator who introduced the measure, Mayhall, is described as retired from the pharmaceutical industry. This means that he is probably old enough to remember the grand old days of Jim Crow and blacks not being able to eat in restaurants, and he's probably nostalgic for that era. I rest my case.
K-Man: Thanks for stopping by but I won't tolerate unsubstantiated charges of racism on this blog. No more please. Unbelievable dumness in legislating, yes. Racism, no. Thank you.
I wonder if there's a chance that the sponsors were making some kind of obscure point here, rather than seriously introducing legislation they hoped would pass. Like "this is not a problem government can solve" or "we need to stop nanny-governing and micromanaging business".
To answer my own question:
No.
Wesley, maybe you're right and my comments about racist motivations for the bill were out of line. But look at the big picture. Of the 50 states, Mississippi consistently comes in at the bottom on public health expenditures and overall measures such as infant mortality, which strongly implies official indifference. Now some legislator just happens to introduce a sanctimonious bill to address the adult obesity problem of all things? Dumbness, yes...
k-man: Official indifference, I am not sure about. Mississippi is a poor state. But as to your last two sentences, you will get no arguments from me there.
Sounds like a parody of the smoking bill, to me.
Making it illegal for resturants to have folks doing unhealthy things (smoking) inside.
Making it illegal for resturants to have folks doing unhealthy things(eating generally larger meals while already large) inside.
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