There is an article in the current issue of The Seattle Weekly entitled "Big Nanny Is Watching You." It is about how the city of Seattle is turning into Nannytown, trying to regulate our behavior and restrict our freedoms in the name of making this a more liveable city. They focus on a few recent legal maneuvers:

• New restrictions on strip clubs in the city. Dancers can't come within four feet of patrons; no drinking is allowed; tips go in a tip jar; bright lighting is required.
• A ban on sales of the kind of liquor that is frequently purchased by the homeless: any beer with alcohol content over 5.7% costing less than 4 cents per ounce.
• The statewide smoking ban, approved last November by voters by an almost 2 to 1 margin. It outlaws smoking in all workplaces and within 25 feet of the entrance or of ventilation ducts of any publicly accessible building.
• An aggressive anti-smoking campaign at http://www.ashtraymouth.com, and its accompanying TV commercials.

I have mixed feelings about all of this. I'm one of the most strongly anti-smoking people around, and have been for eons. (When I was a kid, my dad used to send me down to the corner store to buy him cigarettes -- this back in the day when I might or might not have to say something like "They're for my father" in order to get them to sell me a pack -- and at one point I attempted a moratorium on supporting him in his vile habit. I got in a lot of trouble for refusing to buy cigarettes for him. I think he believed it was more about not wanting to be bothered to run the errand than about taking a moral stance, and he may have been partly right, but he was also capable of being a bully, and it was hard to stand up to him in general. He eventually quit smoking in his mid 50s, when he had a quadruple bypass that only extended his life by about ten years.) Although I did vote yes on the anti-smoking initiative last fall, even I had reservations, because I did identify with the big-brotherness of it all.

What convinces me, though, that smoking is a different behavior from going to strip clubs or drinking beer in the streets is that second-hand smoke cannot be avoided. I don't have to go to strip clubs if I choose not to. I don't have to interact with homeless people if they give me the willies. Granted, this might mean going out of my way to avoid certain neighborhoods, but avoiding neighborhoods where homeless people hang out is not really going very much out of my way.

I think that when a smoker makes me inhale his or her exhaled cigarette smoke, I ought to have the right to take chewing gum out of my mouth and force them to chew it. I feel like picking my nose and flicking my boogers at them. So I have no compunction about inconveniencing them or marginalizing them. In fact, I'd be comfortable with a law outlawing all outdoor smoking. I can't walk around downtown Seattle without getting a whiff. Whose rights does smoking infringe upon?

As for the larger issue, is Seattle becoming Nannytown? Yeah, it kind of seems that way. But not because of the smoking ban.