Jeez. So Nicole Kidman smokes a cigarette and the world is brought to its knees. I don’t know where to start responding in less than 4,000 words …

I’m a lot irritated by the antismoking lobby. More specifically, by the way the antismoking lobby handles itself. I mean, probably eight out of every ten points it tries to make are valid: Smoking is dangerous, it’s bad for people who do it, and it’s bad for people who spend a lot of time around people who do it. Perhaps worst of all, it continues to make some of the worst people in the entire world obscenely wealthy, people whose attitude toward the people who buy their products is reminiscent of the WWII-era Nazis.

(NOTE: I don’t make this invocation lightly, because I hate it when people do that. But seriously, what I’ve heard of these guys’ private memos to each other read like greeting cards from Hitler to Goerring.)

Anyway, so there are plenty of good reasons not to smoke, and not to publicly promote smoking. (In the interest of full disclosure [like I matter enough to need to disclose anything fully], I smoked for several years, and have since quit, though often when I’m drinking I’ll have a smoke or two.)

That said, though, you’ve gotta draw the line somewhere, and my problem with many staunch antismokers is that they apparently don’t believe a word of that — their rights, they seem to believe, trump those of everyone who disagrees with them, and so you have things like city- or statewide smoking bans, of the type New York City recently enacted.

Yes, everyone has a right not to breathe carcinogens in against their will. But if individuals make a choice to do so, as they have since long before there was a tobacco industry, they shouldn’t be marginalized or socially outcast because of that choice, so long as it’s not directly harming anyone else.

“Aha,” you say, “but in smoking restaurants and bars, they ARE harming other people!” Bars, yes. Fine. There are definitely bars that even I’ve been to where the smoke gets so thick, you literally can’t see across the room, and it gets downright oppressive. Restaurants, however, generally have what’s referred to as a “smoking section” and a “nonsmoking section,” and assuming the former is properly separated and vented (which it can be, pretty easily), it’s obnoxious and intrusive to demand that even these separate sections be removed. Basically, by doing so, you become what you yourself, staunch antismoker, have despised all these years about people who blow their smoke in your face and laugh — by alienating another group of people, you do to them what you see them as having done to you all these years. And two wrongs, despite what pro-death penalty people will tell you, still don’t make a right.

Similarly, I’m all for smoking bars and nonsmoking bars, or bars with separate smoking sections — if you can do it successfully in a restaurant, you can do it successfully in a bar. But by completely outlawing that choice, by taking that decision out of the hands of the business owner, you basically state that your personal feelings, and those of the people who agree with you, are the final word, period, and everybody who disagrees with you becomes an outlaw, should they choose to stick to their guns.

This has very little to do with Nicole Kidman, who, in short, is a celebrity but not necessarily a role model, and who besides that is allowed to have bad habits. Even if one is unfortunate enough to consider an actor a role model, what moron thinks role models can be perfect? It’s a sticky, ridiculous slope. Statemenst like this:

Anti-smoking campaigners said the Oscar-winning actor was one of Australia’s greatest success stories who, as a role model for young women, has a duty to not promote the habit.

“We accept that Nicole Kidman has a right to smoke, but with celebrity comes a responsibility to avoid promoting lethal and addictive products to young people,” said Anne Jones, of the Action on Smoking and Health group in Australia.

“Mass media coverage of celebrity smokers, like Nicole Kidman, is priceless for the tobacco industry in their drive to addict new smokers, most of whom are children,” Jones said in a statement.

And so here’s the biggest problem with picking a role model for your kid, instead of ferchrissake BEING ONE YOURSELF: You can’t control how these people behave. Whereas you can, I don’t know, act like a responsible adult and talk with your kids about why you think smoking is wrong, what you don’t like about it, etc.

Anyway. ‘Nuff said. T’much said, probably.