Missouri has been trying to pass a tax hike on cigarettes for a very long time. This year, the state will hold yet another vote on Prop B that will raise taxes significantly on cigarettes with the goal of lowering the state’s high number of smokers (26% of the state’s population.) The money collected through the tax hike will be invested into education and research.

So far the story sounds quite boring. But here is where the hilarity begins. There is an organization called Missouri Right to Life. As you can guess from its name, this is an anti-choice group that “opposes the killing of innocent human life at any stage, even the single cell stage.” 

Missouri Right to Life also opposes the state’s anti-smoking measures. Apparently, the killing of innocent human life through smoking doesn’t bother the group a whole lot. For some bizarre reason, the organization decided that the money the state of Missouri gains from this tax hike will not be invested into education and research and will be diverted to cloning instead. Cloning is prohibited in Missouri, but who cares? Missouri Right to Life, which would be more aptly called “Missouri Right to Die of Lung Cancer”, still insists that the anti-smoking bill is introduced to promote cloning.

The leaps of logic that religious fanatics are capable of are truly bizarre.

P.S. I personally oppose the special tax rates on cigarettes in any society that doesn’t offer free comprehensive state health insurance to every citizen. This isn’t the point of the post, though. The post is about the hypocrisy of anti-choice religious fanatics.

N and I look like alcoholic vegetarians at the check-out counter.

An anonymous commenter says:

This is what happens when you say anything that is not wildly enthusiastic about Jane Austen. I don’t know any other author who provokes this obsessive protectiveness.

I know one such other writer.

It’s Ken Follett. I once wrote a critical review of his most recent novel and people got simply rabid. I’m a passionate reader but it would never occur to me to get so worked up because somebody didn’t like the same book I did.

The culmination of that debate was when one of my detractors discovered that I also once wrote a positive review for Tampax tampons.

“See, she writes good reviews for something so nasty,” he exclaimed gleefully. “Of course, she is incapable of understanding Follett!”

I still haven’t found a connection between tampons and Follett’s book, but people’s minds work in strange ways.

When asked if they respect people less for having sex with many partners, American college students ended up in the following groups:

48 per cent: “Egalitarian conservatives” who lost equal respect for men and women they believed were hooking up too much (54 per cent of women surveyed fell into this category, compared with 35 per cent of men).

27 per cent: “Egalitarian libertarians” who do not lose respect for men or women, no matter how much they sleep around.

12 per cent: “Traditional double standard” holders who lost respect for women, but not men, for hooking up too much.

13 per cent: “Reverse double standard” holders who lost respect for men, but not women, for having casual sex with too many partners.

As we can see, the double standard is dying out. But the prudishness is still alive and kicking. Please notice that women are much more likely to impose and uphold prudish judgments about sexuality than men. This is what I’ve been saying for as long as I’ve been blogging and now we have proof that, as usual, I’m absolutely right. Sexual liberation prevents the traditionally-minded women from selling a few lousy sex acts in exchange for a lifetime of financial security. Of course, such people resent the sexual freedom of others because that freedom makes the goods they are trying to peddle meet with very little demand.