American Values Alliance | Practical voice for progressive valuesAmerican Values Alliance | Practical voice for progressive valuesAnd now, in a dispatch from the ever-protective "nanny state" advocates, comes this bill recently submitted in the Mississippi legislature:
"Any food establishment to which this section applies shall not be allowed to serve food to any person who is obese, based on criteria prescribed by the State Department of Health..."
I can't even summon the proper amount of snark to comment......
Sheila Suess Kennedy's blog | login or register to post comments
If the state can require restaurants not to serve food to obese people, next thing you know it’ll be requiring gas stations not to sell gasoline to people who drive sports cars.
Some behaviors are more risky than others, but the point is, most of us engage in one or more behaviors that are risky or could be considered risky. Do we really want the state that involved in our personal choices?
My nieces have the right of it (from Lilo and Stitch): Stupid-heads!
Maybe there's a connection here. Rather than insisting that straight people, um, straighten up about marriage (it's not a Spring Pageant where you are automatically crowned king and queen and get presents), let's stop the evil gay hoards from coming in and messing it up for us all. Oh, yeah, and while we're at it, let's criminalize fatty foods, hot beverages and such, because people are too stupid to be responsible for themselves.
Life isn't a box of kittens. True. But, no one's doing it to us but us. Stupid-heads.
Oh, and where the hell is my donut?
________
Lalita L. Amos, CRC
http://www.totalteamsolutions.com
http://totalteam.blogspot.com
Sheila and Lalita: You don't know how absolutely thrilled I was to discover this little legislative nugget today. As you know, SJR7, the proposed so-called "Marriage Protection Amendment" to the Indiana constitution has been declared clinically dead in the General Assembly by most observers, yet cynical and cautious folks like me have not been quite ready to OK the death certificate until the last gavel comes down on March 14th. I and others on various blogsites have over-used the familiar phrase: "It Ain't Over Until The Fat Lady Sings", looking nervously around to see what may come flying over the Internet waves in response to such severe political incorectness. Lalita suggests that I ought not to be at all reluctant to use that term. So I shall stop trying to make low-colorie substitutions by using alternate phrases like: "Termination shall not be construed to have occurred until the designated female soporano has completed her aria, or the curtain falls, whichever occurs first."
I feel better already. Where are the deep fried donuts?
I had to see this one for myself.
Unbelieveable.
Warning: Non-PC Rant to Follow!
Every Friday night, my husband and I head off to Lafayette to visit with family there. Invariably we belly up to one of the several buffet-style eating establishments and I can say this with confidence: healthy people are not to be found there. The foods contain the gut-busting trifecta--fat, flour and sugar--in huge quantities and it's not surprising to see the super-obese eathing all they can eat there (along with their children who are laboring to carry their piled-high plates back to the table).
Still, I simply don't believe that mandating health does the trick. It doesn't get to the thinking that causes people to shuck their self-control in favor of oral (hell, or genital, or any other kind of) satisfaction. In a study done by IBM and reported at their 2004 Global Innovation Conference, they discussed the healthcare crisis. Doctors there said that the chief killer was heart disease, which is caused by the exact same conditions they've been discussing with patients for the last 50 years...stress, poor diet, poor exercise, overindulgence in booze and smoking. Fifty years and even when a patient has had a "heart hiccup" they still do all those wrong things....and they die or suffer increasingly painful angina. Nothing changed even when their lives depend on it.
I come from Southern people and I'm seen as a heretic for serving corn bread that isn't swimming in butter, greens with smoked turkey "hocks" instead of pork, cake made with yogurt or plum jam instead of fat. They rave over my cooking but go home and eat themselves into higher and higher blood pressure, all the while proclaiming that Satan is causing their ills--that God can fix them...and still allow them to eat foods that the Bible never suggested were kosher or hilal or in anywise foods people could live a long and healthy life on.
What they've said to me was that they had to die of something and it's only been when I explained to my Dad that he may not "go" all at once, but linger in pain and disability for months or years in a bed in a nursing home before death claimed him that he began to wise up. Oh, and the fact that he'd just had a two month stay in a nursing home, so weak from pneumonia that he couldn't stand. He got the message and is, as I write this, at the gym, building his 4 pack abs. He's 70.
Telling people what to do isn't getting the job done there and it won't get the job done here. The human mind is designed to repeat pleasurable circumstances over and over and, unfortunately as these people shift their satiety centers to need more stimulation to achieve the satiety we may feel quicker (and with less carbs), they'll balk at any attempt to deprive them of their "food fix."
All this gets tied with a particularly ugly bow: political correctness. We can't call a fat guy "fat" and we all have to pay for his increased health plan usage when heart disease and diabetes begin their early ravaging of his body. We're supposed to shut up when he demands a bigger seat on a plane (for the same price as everyone else) and the airport accommodates him by increasing the ticket price for us all to account for the loss of a fare. The actions of one junkie or drunk can destroy a family for generations, as innocent children try to adjust to the unthinkable and, in some cases, never learn to trust...or pick up addictions of their own to pass down to the next generation along with the bone china.
Here's a thought: let's start calling fat people "fat" again (or the alky "alky" or the slutty gal or guy "roundheel" or the stoner "junky") and suggest that they be responsible for their actions and the results--and that they also understand that they don't live in a vacuum. Their results impact us all. And what about this: we don't have to fix your stuff. Grow up and take care of your lives yourselves--you only get one issued to you and to squander it would be an inexcusable waste.
Whew! I feel better.
________
Lalita L. Amos, CRC
http://www.totalteamsolutions.com
http://totalteam.blogspot.com
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