PrintNovember 6, 2010
Get Ready for the Fat Police
Try to imagine the following scenario. You take your children to a restaurant and begin scanning the menu. Suddenly, you notice a uniformed officer casually strolling over to your table. He stands within earshot as you tell the waiter that you'd like to order cheeseburgers, fries, and shakes for you, your son, and your daughter. The waiter looks toward the officer and gets a thumbs-down. "I'm sorry, ma'am," the waiter says, "but that's against the law."
Impossible, you say? Improbable, you think? Well, San Francisco, that bastion of liberal orthodoxy, has, through their Board of Supervisors, passed a law that tells parents what they can and can't feed their children. Most of us have heard of McDonald's Happy Meals, which offer toys to children with their food order. Of course, parents are the ones ordering for their kids and paying the check. Hence, one would think the decision about what their children eat is their business, not the business of a bunch of nosy control freaks. With McDonald's being hovered over by sentinels in the city by the bay, eyeing every morsel they sell, how long before we're being watched in our kitchens as we reach for the salt shaker or the ketchup bottle?
But what can you expect from a city that has elected Nancy "we have to pass the bill in order to know what's in it" Pelosi to Congress umpteen times? What can you expect from a state that has elected Barbara Boxer to a fourth term in the Senate and Jerry (Moonbeam) Brown as its governor? Keep in mind that California is about 150 billion dollars in debt as a result of its liberal spending policies. Instead of electing conservatives dedicated to reining in that bloated bureaucracy, Californians continue to elect liberals who love to spend other people's money and, ultimately, expect the rest of the country to bail them out. Ronald Reagan was right on target with this observation: "To say that liberals spend like drunken sailors is unfair to drunken sailors, because at least the sailors spend their own money."
The same can be said about liberals who want to control what people eat. They're not satisfied with controlling their own eating habits; they want to control yours, too. According to the recently enacted passage in the San Francisco Health Code
A restaurant may combine a free toy or incentive item with the purchase of a meal if the meal does not include any of the following as defined in the ordinance: excessive calories, excessive sodium, excessive fat (excessive will be determined by the little dictators who sit on the board), including saturated fat, and trans fat exceeding 0.5 grams. A meal must also contain at least 0.5 cups or more of fruits or vegetables. Breakfast items must contain 0.5 cups of fruits or vegetables. A Restaurant may provide a free toy or Incentive Item in combination with the purchase of a single food item or beverage if the food or beverage includes less than 35% of total calories from fat and less than 10% of calories from added caloric sweeteners. The Department of Public Health shall enforce the ordinance and the Director of the Health Department may issue administrative citations for the violations of the ordinance under San Francisco Administrative Code Chapter 100.
The foregoing is another example of government out of control. If the people who sit on the Board want to concern themselves with eating habits, they should confine their supervision to their own families. But that's not how leftists think. In their imperious view of the world, all people must conform to the autocratic rule of a select few elitists.
While most people are working at real jobs, paying taxes, and raising families, these arrogant fiefdom-builders huddle together in sidewalk cafés, sipping cappuccino with pinkies held aloft, and plot ways to control every act, thought, and pattern of behavior in their community. Then they get themselves elected to boards in order to use the parliamentary power of their positions to force their view of social conformity on people who once thought they had the freedom to choose their own destiny.
A McDonald's spokesperson said, "It's not what our customers want, nor is it something they asked for." Of course not! Do you think those power-hungry zealots care what the public wants? Like the Democrats in the recent midterm elections, their lust for supremacy over our lives will continuously defy the will of the American people. The ideologue in the White House, along with his coterie of like-minded idealists, looked at the opinion polls, which proclaimed loud and clear that the country's citizens are against this rapacious usurpation of their freedoms, and decided that the people don't matter. Last week, the voters disabused them of that disdainful decision.
Bob Weir is a former detective sergeant in the New York City Police Department. He is the executive editor of The News Connection in Highland Village, Texas. E-mail Bob.
