Aug 30 2009
Knee Jerk Opinions Sometimes FAIL
Interesting. There’s a former Bill Sali spokesperson (and that should tell you a LOT already) by the name of Wayne Hoffman, who operates a “think tank” now. People whose opinions I respect have been lamenting the fact that the Boise Statesman seems to have lost its marbles in giving this guy a regular forum by printing his columns. In fact, I’ve been thinking the same thing about the Post Register, in that they’ve also been printing his columns (I guess the better to give local extremists less to crab about).
Without exception, the positions he takes are not well thought through (prompting a letter writer today to wonder about the concept of the “think” tank) and they are usually standard boring fodder for the AM Talk Radio crowd. I usually comment on them but don’t spend a whole lot of time in the debate…folks that would agree with him are usually not able to be reasoned with and it’s difficult to have a rational discussion with that type of individual.
So imagine my surprise last week when I read one of his columns that made sense to me. He said that Boise State University went too far when it banned smoking on campus and also in the cars parked in its parking lots. He felt that while smoking is a vile habit, the university crossed the line when it tried to regulate what a person could do within the privacy of their car. That made sense to me, but I could also see that the university might feel people would abuse the no smoking rule and the cars would become little smoke factories (like the burn barrels outside buildings where people went to smoke in the winter time the first few years that smoking was banned in most public buildings). So I wondered, maybe designate some close rows of parking as smoke free? I then finished reading the paper online (I was in a hotel room in Nampa last week) and signed off…weirded out by the fact that I agreed with him on this.
Well, that same letter writer from today pointed out the fallacy of the “privacy in your car” issue…just being in your car doesn’t give you the right to break the law…and it hit me. DAMN! I had totally had a knee jerk moment and also didn’t take the time to think the issue through before I wrote. Of course, BSU has a “no smoking on campus” rule which includes their parking lots, on which the cars are parked. Just because you’re in your car, does not mean you don’t have to follow the law! Otherwise, people could smoke pot in their cars if they wanted, and no one could arrest them for it because they were in their own car!
I went back to the Post Talk section to see how embarrassed I’d have to be, and I saw that the usual suspects (Lindsey Turley Smith and Ken Anderson) had agreed with Wayne. However, Dan Henry (he of the forthright and boldly expressed opposition opinions) had pointed out that merely being in your car was no excuse or license for breaking the rules. It’s amazing how he gets right to the heart of something and sees past the layers of crap surrounding it (and he says he thinks I do the same thing so this is a particularly embarrassing slip on my part).
But I’ll admit it, I was wrong on this one, and I’m willing to admit, sometimes knee jerk opinions need to be rethought.
