Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality."(King Jr. 407) By placing a smoking ban in public places the mayor is forcing segregation between those who smoke and those who do not. At one point segregation was based on the color of your skin. Now it is based on the color of your lungs. Smoking is an addiction, but Bloomberg is marking this addiction as illegal. If it is to be marked illegal then it should fall onto the tobacco industry and not the smoker.
The smoking ban is another form of segregation where it once was an object that brought people of different classes together. "Cigarettes quickly emerged as a democratic pursuit that crossed all social strata, with factory worker and factory owner often smoking the same brand. Even if they seldom mixed, blacks, Jews, Poles and Italians could temporarily bond over a sidewalk smoke." (Jacobs, NY Times) Smoking forms bonds that look past race, status and class; it brings together people from all over for 15-minutes to share in the pleasure of a cigarette. After so many years, people of different races have been trying to come together as friends, and if smoking is the way to bring together people, whether they are both smokers, or just one of them is, let it be. The mayor is endangering friendships.
Mayor Bloomberg's smoking ban of 2003 is a reflection of a similar type of segregation that African American men, women, and children faced in the 1950's. His law is unjust in that it is segregating a smoker from a non-smoker. The smoker is given the feeling of weakness with this new law. Now a smoker can no longer sit with a non-smoker and enjoy a beer together while one of them has a cigarette. Instead now one has to leave the bar and smoke his cigarette outside as if he was inferior to his non-smoking colleague.
